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eBay's busy week: Kijiji, Firefox, Yahoo
This week has been a very busy one for eBay. We had the U.S. launch of their classifieds site kijiji on Tuesday and today a partnership with Firefox in the UK/Europe and a new Yahoo/eBay co-branded toolbar.
Kijiji in U.S.
Rafat at PaidContent has a good overview of the U.S. Kijiji launch. The classifieds site has been live since 2005 in Asia, Europe and Canada and launched this week in the U.S. My initial question is whether this raises any conflict of interest issues as eBay, parent of Kijiji also owns a 25% stake in category leader Craigslist. At the Social Media Club last month, Craigslist founder said that he rarely meets with eBay. Comparing Kijiji and Craigslist on usability, Kijiji wins. We will need to see if Kijiji can generate an audience which is the most critical element for any classifieds site. (side note: how do you pronounce this company name?)
Firefox eBay edition
Today eBay has launched a customized Firefox version for the UK, France and Germany. The feature list looks perfect for the heavy eBay'r. Almost anything you can do on the actual web site, you can monitor in the browser. Using this customized Firefox version should assure you never miss the chance to win an original Optimus Prime Transformer. It's only a matter of time before this customized version works with the U.S. eBay version.
Duncan wonders, "Whilst Mozilla is more than entitled to partner and provide such a service, open source purists may see the deal as Mozilla selling out." I think there is nothing wrong with what Firefox is doing here and I am sure we will see more of this as their browser share grows. As long as they always offer the base version there is no reason they shouldn't be able to generate revenue from these type of partnerships.
Co-branded eBay/Yahoo toolbar
Yahoo and eBay have partnered together to offer a toolbar that offers search on both eBay, Half.com and Yahoo. Advanced search features let you search any Yahoo property. I would think that heavy eBay users would prefer the above Firefox customized edition as the toolbar offers you only some basic eBay functions. More details on the eBay blog. I believe we will see more of this co-branding between popular service offering and advertising partner/search engine.
