30 years of...

From laser pens and Beanie Babies to millionaires and their Ferraris...

- BY EMMELINE SAUNDERS

ITS first sale was a broken laser pointer which went for just over a tenner, or £11.06 to be exact.

Since then, eBay has exploded into a global auction site, with 134 million users.

Marking its 30th anniversary today, the little website that first launched as AuctionWeb now boasts 2.4 billion listings and has made thousands of ordinary people millionaires - including more than 1,000 in the UK.

Starting life as a giant garage sale, eBay's budding entrepreneurs quickly spotted retail opportunities for all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff.

The auction site's early days coincided with the mid-1990s Beanie Baby craze. Eager collectors flocked to the site to buy and sell their rare examples.

Founder Pierre Omidyar became a billionaire just three years after launching eBay, when it went public.

Not bad for something he started "as an experiment, as a side hobby basically, while I had my day job".

Omidyar remembers being baffled by the site's first sale, but was assured by the buyer that he really liked to collect broken laser pointers.