Yahoo and ebay have launched an online portal Sekaimon, which will translate the content on ebay into Japanese and help customers with payments, shipping, and customs clearance.
Under the terms of the agreement, users in Japan will be able to bid for items on ebay through the Yahoo auction site in Japan by March 2008. Similarly, by mid-2008 the customers in the US will be able to buy Yahoo Japan items through the ebay site.
We are excited to partner with Yahoo Japan in providing Japanese users with localized site designed to enable them to shop on the ebay marketplace with ease and convenience, said Meg Whitman, chief executive at ebay.
According to Associated Press, Yahoo Japan has more than 15m auction items listed on its auction site while ebay has 248m registered users. It also reported that according to Yahoo, Japan’s online auction market grew 27% to $36.4 billion over the previous year while the US grew by 21% to more than $172.7 billion.
This deal marks a return of ebay to the Japanese markets after it had closed operations in 2002. According to the Reuters, ebay has been attempting to bolster its presence in Asia through its joint venture with Tom Group to compete against Alibaba.com. It also launched a Thai e-commerce site in collaboration with Sanook online in May 2007.
Yahoo and ebay have been partners since 2006. Yahoo provides exclusive branded advertising to ebay and uses Paypal, ebay’s payment service to receive payments for the Yahoo services used by customers.
Source: ComputerWire daily updates
