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...never heard of a website called Kijiji, you're not alone. Named for the Swahili word for "village," this new classified service owned by eBay draws just 2.5 million unique visitors in the U.S. each month - less than a tenth of the visitors to Craigslist. Nonetheless, this seemingly inconsequential site with an oddball name is at the heart of a legal scuffle between eBay and Craigslist, in which the companies are suing each other for unfairly undermining their business. A quick glance at the global online listings market reveals why classifieds-king Craigslist is worried. While Kijiji is just...
...Kijiji's sudden rise has lit a fire not just under Craigslist - which claims that eBay used its minority interest in Craigslist to steal its business secrets (while eBay maintains that Craigslist unlawfully diluted its shares) - but throughout the $15 billion market for online classifieds. Even as lesser rivals fall by the wayside - Microsoft's Windows Live Expo is shuttering on July 31 - newcomers such as Kijiji and Oodle are gaining real traction. Better designed and marketed, these upstarts are reshaping a long-stagnant sector of the web. Meanwhile, the entire online classified market category has surged some 35% over...
...only general-purpose classified site that is catching up with Craigslist in terms of actual listings. Three years ago, Kijiji didn't even exist. Today it is the top online classified service in France, Germany and Taiwan. It's also neck and neck with Craigslist in Canada. Combined with eBay's other international classified hubs - which include Marktplaats in the Netherlands and Gumtree in the United Kingdom - eBay's portfolio of classifieds actually get more unique visitors around the globe than Craigslist. (As eBay's core auction business has slowed, its classifieds division has posted triple-digit growth over...
...secret to Kijiji's success, says Jacob Aqraou, general manager of eBay's classified division, is an improved user interface and a more vigilant approach to scaring off scammers and spammers. Whereas Craigslist feels hippie and homegrown, Kijiji features niceties such as images that appear in search results by default and more intuitive menus for refining your search. To drum up interest, eBay also spammed millions of its most active members when Kijiji's U.S. site launched in June...
...Craigslist alleges that eBay used its seat on Craigslist's board to glean inside information that it then applied to its own classified site. But to a casual viewer, Kijiji bears more resemblance to its sister site, eBay.com. "It borrows a lot of things from eBay," says general manager Aqraou, who is based in Denmark. For example, Kijiji uses software developed at eBay to identify nudity in photos in order to cut down on inappropriate postings. It's also available in the local language for more of its foreign language sites than Craigslist and even accepts Spanish listings in parts...