Kijiji, eBay’s online classified Web site, is no more, at least in the U.S. While the name and service caught on quite well in Eastern Europe, Canada and Australia, it’s been consistently trounced by Craigslist in the U.S.
E-Commerce Guide takes a look at the rebranded eBay Classifieds site and what the company is doing to spruce up the site to attract more traffic and advertising revenue.
Along with a pair of new mobile commerce apps for the iPhone, eBay is poised to unveil a new app for Apple’s iPad tablet when it’s released April 3.
eBay says it has also improved the site’s filtering technology to weed out spam and bogus listings, and redesigned the layout to give it a more polished, professional look.
Now that eBay has killed off the Kijiji brand in the United States and affixed its own corporate moniker to its classified site, the ecommerce giant could be poised to make some inroads into a market dominated by Craigslist, according to one financial analyst.
“The rebranding of Kijiji in the U.S. to the more widely recognized/trusted eBay brand makes sense and is long overdue,” Broadpoint AmTech analyst Ben Schachter said in a research note, adding that he hoped the move would put an end to eBay’s (NASDAQ: EBAY) “disjointed domestic strategy in local classifieds.”
eBay, which owns a 25 percent stake in Craigslist, has struggled to make a go of it in the domestic online classified sector on its own.
