July 06, 2007 | Friday
eBay taking on Google in classifieds
By Jackie Danicki - Blogger in News |Online Sales |Search Engines |Google
Despite holding a seat on the board of Craigslist and at the risk of cannibalising its core business, eBay is moving more robustly into online classifieds.
The company, which bought a 25% stake in Craigslist three years ago, has just quietly launched its international classifieds site Kijiji in 220 US cities. Classifieds are so important to eBay that Kijiji (the Swahili word for village) isn’t even the only such site they own; Marktplaats in Holland and LoQUo in Spain are two key regional e-commerce platforms for the company.
The fact is that the classifieds space has become a rather fragmented market as new options - such as Amazon’s Marketplace, Facebook Marketplace and Edgeio - have become available to sellers and gained the sort of credibility that eBay has had for a while. So why bring in Kijiji?
One possibility is that eBay tried and failed to buy a larger stake in Craigslist, and has decided to pull out the big guns. Another is that it fears never making any real money from Craigslist, whose founders are extremely wary of ever charging for its listings or otherwise aggressively pursuing major profits (the site did $25 million in revenue last year).
Yet another possibility - and the one that follows a thread we’ve been tracking here - is that eBay sees this as a big chance to get one over on Google. With the search giant pushing Google Base, Google Product Search, and Google Checkout, e-commerce is clearly an area where they plan to take no prisoners in a quest for dominance.
eBay has already squared up to Google by making PayPal a bank in order to fight off Google Checkout, and even yanking all its ads from Google only a few weeks ago in order to show them who’s boss. eBay has an outright ban on Google Checkout being used as a payment method on its site, so there has never even been a pretense of ‘co-opitition’.
Kijiji looks like the latest peck in one of the most high-powered, high-stakes chicken fights of all time. Who will lose the most feathers remains to be seen. Watch this space…
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