Gov. Mike Leavitt scheduled a Thursday appearance with eBay chief executive officer Meg Whitman to announce the online auction giant will open a customer service center in Draper in July.
The Internet's largest online trading site, eBay has a 24-hour trading community on the Web and adds 250,000 new items to its auction lists each day in more than 1,000 categories, ranging from gemstones and antiques to sports memorabilia, toys and computers.More than eight million people visited eBay's Web site in March, according to the company, and eBay has more than 2.1 million registered users.
The Draper expansion will be eBay's first operations outside its headquarters in San Jose, Calif. The service center will field phone and e-mail questions from buyers and sellers.
No announcement has been made on the number of employees eBay plans for the service center or what the salaries will be. The service center will be located in Draper's Wasatch Corporate Park.
A number of job openings are advertised at the company's Web site http://www.ebay.com, though locations for the open positions or the number of openings for each job listed are not given.
According to the company, Pierre Omidyar launched eBay in 1995 after being persuaded by his wife, a collector of Pez candy dispensers, that the Web would be a convenient central location to buy and sell unique items.
The company hosted almost 23 million auctions during the first quarter of 1999, generating revenue by collecting a commission on each auction transaction. eBay had net revenues of $34 million and net income of $5.9 million during the first quarter.
eBay is churning much of its income back into the company's infrastructure -- beefing up computer hardware, Internet bandwidth and additional technical and customer support employees.