Ms. Whitman, of course, has made her share of mistakes. She was slow to expand in Japan, letting Yahoo take most of the auction business. And she was too conservative in developing a way for people to use credit cards. PayPal, a money-transfer service, offered $5 bounties to new customers and walked away with the market. But Ms. Whitman has a trait that many chief executives lack: she is not afraid to do an about-face. Earlier this year, eBay simply pulled out of Japan, ceding it to Yahoo. And last month it tried to buy PayPal, which was valued at over $1 billion in its recent public offering, but talks broke down.
"We have been careful to remain humble," Ms. Whitman said. "We have to be free to say what we did didn't work out and we'll try again."
EBay, for instance, originally said it would merge Half.com into eBay's main site, then said it would keep the sites separate. It imposed fees in the formerly free iBazar site in France, only to remove most of them as users objected.
"You have to honor and respond to the community of users," Ms. Whitman said. If that slows down the pace of change, so be it.
EBay seems unusually obsessed with trying to see the world through users' eyes. Employees are encouraged to buy and sell on the site, and they boast of their feedback ratings, or tally of satisfied customers.
"If you give a presentation to Meg, she'll say, `Great. What do your top 20 sellers think?' " said Josh Kopelman, founder of Half.com. "If you don't know, she'll ask why not."
Similarly, Ms. Whitman set up the Voice of the Customer meetings to bring people to San Jose. At the time of the most recent session, she was in China, but her top management team took visitors to a Japanese steakhouse in San Jose and spent the next day with them, hearing all manner of gripes.
Mr. Ward, who runs the jewelry and aviation products business, complained bitterly that eBay no longer let him include a link to his Web site. Like many eBay sellers, Mr. Ward does most of his business on his own site, findsonline.net.
"Your link policy was a big blow to us," Mr. Ward said. Rob Chesnut, who enforces compliance with eBay's rules, told him the policy helps "the community" by keeping buyers on the site, but Mr. Ward was not convinced.
Jay Sensese, who sells more than 150,000 CD's a year over eBay, asked why his customers were distracted by banner ads from CDNow, an online album retailer. Jeff Jordan, a former Disney executive who now runs eBay's American operations, contritely promised that the ads would not be renewed.
Jerry Van Nostrand, who became a dealer of 1950's housewares after selling the contents of his mother's house on eBay, said some of his wares were hard to find. "Ashtrays," he grumbled, are listed under "advertising."
Everyone complained bitterly about rising fees. EBay increased its take of sale prices earlier this year by 0.25 percentage points. (The fees range from 1.5 percent to 5.25 percent.) And it introduced a 5 cent fee to use its popular "Buy it now" feature. Ms. Whitman has told Wall Street she hoped all fees combined would rise from 7.5 percent to close to 10 percent of total sales.
"The funny thing about eBay is that people have a love-hate relationship with them," said Debra Schaum, a Bronx, N.Y., computer consultant who sells miniature collectibles. "People spend a lot of time complaining about it, but they are still there."
This complex relationship makes for more than a few challenges for eBay managers, whose every move is ridiculed on eBay's message boards.
"I have never had my job performance criticized so broadly and so openly," Mr. Jordan said. "We are trying to run a corporation that optimizes its profits at the same time we are running one of the more empowering social phenomena of the last decade."
EBay's toughest critic on Wall Street is Holly Becker, a Lehman Brothers analyst, who complains that domestic revenue growth has slowed to an "uninspiring" 45 percent, from 64 percent last year.
Lots of investors wonder about eBay's sky-high stock price — at $51.28, down from a 52-week high of $72.74, it is still 132 times earnings — but they do not doubt that its business will continue to grow even if its share price falls.
Ms. Whitman must have some good ideas if she is to meet her 2005 revenue goal.
"The $3 billion is Meg's BHAG," Mr. Kagle said, referring to the Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals promoted by James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras in their book "Built to Last."
EBay still needs to develop $1 billion in revenue from its international affiliates, plus $1 billion from selling items with fixed prices.
Part of the growth has come as eBay has attracted big manufacturers and retailers like Home Depot and I.B.M. Ms. Whitman herself called on Louis V. Gerstner Jr., then chairman of I.B.M., and Samuel J. Palmisano, then its president — and now its chief executive — to persuade them to sell personal computers on eBay.
It was a complicated discussion, because eBay subjects a Fortune 500 corporation to the same rules as a high school kid in Des Moines selling a few baseball cards — no volume discounts, no preferred placement, no exclusive deals, no escape from sometimes merciless member feedback.
In I.B.M.'s case, though, it didn't hurt that eBay agreed to buy $50 million worth of software at the same time.
But even as big companies establish credibility and help bring buyers to their categories, much of the sales activity remains with smaller players. There are mom-and-pop computer dealers that sell more on eBay than I.B.M. does.
One surprising eBay success has been eBay Motors, the used-car section it began in 1999. Playing to eBay's strength, it started by focusing on unusual cars. But soon it reached out to owners and dealers of mainstream cars. This year, eBay expects to sell more than 200,000 cars, with a value of more than $2 billion.
EBay, which lists about 15,000 cars at a time, still trails other car sites. Autotrader.com has 1.5 million used car listings. Autobytel.com generates 800,000 sales a year for new cars at dealers.
And Jeffrey Schwartz, Autobytel's chief executive, questions whether eBay has the willpower to generate listings from dealers.
"They are so in love with their 80 percent profit margins that they don't have a sales force calling on car dealers," he said. "This is a messy business, and we have 50 people talking to the car dealers every day."
One hallmark of eBay's expansion has been how few people it devotes to finding sellers. It has four new categories it is building this year — sports, home and garden, tickets and travel. Two people split their time managing all four.
But Ms. Whitman argues that if eBay can keep listening to its customers, as it does with the Voice of the Customer program, the growth will take care of itself.
"It's far better for a car dealer to hear about eBay from another car dealer than for our sales force to call on them," she said. "Buyers attract sellers, who in turn attract buyers, and so on. That's been the success formula in every category on eBay so far."
