Why is eBay called eBay?

Answer 1

Popular legend tells us that Pierre Omidyar founded eBay to give his fiancee a place to buy and sell the PEZ dispensers she loved so much. Many have speculated since that the story was just that... a simple story put out by marketers to make eBay seem more interesting.

In a 2010 TechCrunch interview, Omidyar admits his wife's lover for collecting helped him gain insight as he built eBay, but it was not his reason for starting the site in the first place. Omidyar simply wanted to create a "perfect market," and so he founded the then-called AuctionWeb auction site as a side project in 1995.

Answer 2

There are several suggestions as to why this should be so, but perhaps one of the most plausible is that Pierre Omidyar (eBay's founder) previously ran his own consulting business under the name of Echo Bay Technology Group. When he wanted to change the name of his original auction site from Auction Web to Echo Bay, he found that name had already been taken and so shortened it to eBay.