bidorbuy is 10

On this tenth anniversary of South Africa’s online auction site and marketplace, bidorbuy.co.za, let us take you down memory lane.

bidorbuy was born on 14th August 1999.

In the beginning, there was the dotcom boom and Andy Higgins (at present the company’s managing director) working away in London and launching a number of auction websites across Western Europe. There also was a young lady named Mickey and Andy’s hasty trip to Israel to meet her investor father. The rest is history, and you may read more about it in Andy’s introduction to the recently published book Your Guide to Buying and Selling on bidorbuy.

In the beginning, the bidorbuy site looked very different, as illustrated from the earliest screenshot still available on the internet, dating from October 1999:

Notice the number of categories the site had in that distant past, the number of items on offer in each category, and the quaint early spelling of bidorbuy.

The screenshot from August 2000 tells us that bidorbuy sported a rather flamboyant style in its infancy. The number of categories and the number of items on sale show marked improvement:

In August 2005, the bidorbuy homepage acquired most of the elements that are still there today, down to the “Africa’s largest” qualification, though it looked very different:

Remember this? The bidorbuy home page before the implementation of design changes this year:

And on Friday the 14th of August 2009 bidorbuy celebrates its birthday in new apparel:

So, what has changed in the past ten years? Well, statistics tell us that:

• The number of categories grew from nine to over thirty main ones and about 3,000 subcategories;
• The number of items on sale grew from 50 to almost 300,000;
• The number of registered users grew from about two (one seller and one buyer) to almost 400,000.

Other than that, bidorbuy is pretty much the same as it always was: the place where people come to buy, sell and have fun, making it their own in the process.

Whether you have been with bidorbuy.co.za since its beginnings or joined today, this is your anniversary too. Happy birthday to you!

The historical screenshots are from Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Many of the images are not displaying because they are no longer available on the World Wide Web.

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