Leather pants worn by Ronan Keating and a day out with Roy Keane are among the more unusual items that have been bought and sold on eBay’s Irish site since its launch.
The company is marking 20 years in Ireland this year.
Its first Irish sale was a set of vouchers for a round of golf which sold for €102.
The most popular item on the platform at the time was the Apple iPod.
The most expensive item bought by an Irish customer was a Rolls-Royce which sold for €64,000.
More than 215,000 items were sold on eBay’s Irish site last year.
The company set up its first Irish base in 2004 and its European headquarters are located at Blanchardstown in Dublin where it employs around 900 people.
In January, eBay announced 1,000 global job cuts which followed 500 layoffs last year.
The company said the impact of those cuts on its Irish operation was “minimal”.
eBay has been losing market share to bigger rivals such as Amazon and has tried to find niches for the site, such as luxury watches, collectibles, refurbished items and car parts.
“We’ve seen lots of tech companies come into Ireland and leave Ireland but we’ve been here for a long time” said Derek Allgood, vice president of global customer experience at eBay.
“We see ourselves as having a unique selling proposition. We don’t compete with sellers and we don’t have our own inventory. We support our buyers and sellers in a community,” Mr Allgood said.
“We’re not Amazon, we see ourselves as something quite different to Amazon,” he added.
Amazon is not the only big competitor in the online retail sector, with Chinese e-commerce companies Temu and Shein growing in popularity.
“eBay will need to carve out a niche for themselves,” said Damian O’Reilly, Senior Lecturer in Retail Management at TU Dublin.
“The time when they could have been the global number one is gone, they’ve been overtaken by Amazon and now it looks like they could be overtaken by Temu and Shein,” Mr O’Reilly said.
“There are a lot of low-cost producers of product at the moment which makes it very competitive in that marketplace so they will have to redefine themselves,” he added.
Of eBay’s original Irish-based employees who started in 2004, 18 are still with the company.
20 years on, eBay said it remains committed to Ireland.
“We’ll be doing a lot of innovation out of Dublin,” Mr Allgood said.
“We’re here for the long haul,” he added
