eBay Buys German Online Auctioneer

As the online auction giant continues to recover from a recent string of outages, eBay Inc. Tuesday bought alando.de AG, Germany’s largest online trading company.

eBay will take on the services provided by alando.de, which boasts 50,000 registered members, and more than 80,000 items listed in 500 categories.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

alando.de will change its name and URL to www.ebay.de later this year, allowing a few months of transition time before switching to the new global format.

“alando.de and eBay share a common goal of bringing the best online trading experience to the Internet,” said Pierre Omidyar, eBay’s founder and chairman. “The acquisition of alando.de will accelerate eBay’s vision of creating a passionate, vibrant and loyal global trading community and we look forward to building an outstanding site for Germany’s 10 million Internet users.”

“Although alando.de has quickly established itself as Germany’s leading online trading company, the prospect of joining up with a global partner as successful as eBay was just too exciting,” said Alexander Samwer, co-founder and spokesman for alando.de.

eBay has more than 3.8 million registered users and lists 2.2 million items for sale in 1,600 categories. The company is rapidly regaining its position in the market after a now infamous 22-hour site crash which cost it an estimated $3 to $5 million in lost revenue.

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