Internet

Try Jim Cramer's Action Alerts PLUS
CLICK HERE NOW

Yahoo! Waives Auction Listing Fees

06/06/05 - 02:47 PM EDT

Kevin Kelleher

Updated from 1:16 p.m. EDT

In a bid to revive its presence in the online-auction market, Yahoo! is doing away with fees it charges for listing products on its U.S. auctions site.

Yahoo! will waive the listing fees, which had ranged between 5 cents and 75 cents a listing, as well as the transaction fees equal to 2% of the final value of items sold through its site, and the additional 1.5% fee for more expensive items.

The move, which will only affect U.S. auctions, won't apply to auctions in Canada and throughout Asia. Yahoo!'s early entry in Japan made it the top online-auction site in that country, preventing auction leader eBay(EBAY - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr) from ever getting a dominant foothold there.

Yahoo!'s move reportedly was six months in the making, and it wasn't intended as a counterstrike against eBay, which last week announced it would buy shopping-comparison site Shopping.com to expose eBay's sellers to a broader audience of online shoppers. Yahoo! has long offered its own shopping-comparison search engine.

The fee-free auctions may come too late to tap into what had been a growing discontent among eBay sellers that was triggered in part by the company's decision in January to boost listing fees. eBay has since worked to mollify unhappy sellers, some of whom responded with a boycott and by moving some listings to rivals like Yahoo!, Amazon.com and Overstock.com.

Those moves, which included waiving other auction-related fees, seems to have quelled that discontent. But eBay faced another problem as larger sellers began looking for other venues, such as Web-search ads, to market the goods they were selling through eBay. The Shopping.com purchase was done in part to meet those sellers' desire to have access to more shoppers.

Yahoo!'s move is an incremental one in that its auctions have nowhere near the ubiquity as eBay's, and it's unlikely to make a dent in the online-auction giant's sales. But it's emblematic of a larger, longer-term trend of Internet giants encroaching onto one another's turf as each seeks new sources of revenue, and as the lines between search engines and e-commerce grow more blurred.


Previous Story

eBay to Buy Shopping.com

Headlines & Perspectives

Internet

Go To Section Home


06/01/05
eBay to Buy Shopping.com

The sale price of $620 million gives Shopping.com shareholders a 20% premium.


06/01/05
CSFB Likes Google to $350

The brokerage ups its price target after the shares breach its old one.


05/26/05
Yahoo! Tests the Power of 300

The company is aiming to let email users send up to 300 photos in a single message.


08/05/08
Three Internet Stocks That Could Double

These forgotten Internet stocks are being accumulated by hedge funds.


08/15/08
The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street

Raspberries for Apple; You'll be sorry, UBS; Fortress or Fort Knox? Wholly unappetizing Foods; give Liberty AOL or give them...


08/15/08
McCain Fund-Raising Picks Up

The GOP presidential candidate raised $27 million in July.


08/15/08
Cash-Back Cards Aren't Money in the Bank

Some credit and debit cards give you some cash back on purchases. But you need to manage it well to benefit from it.


Your Recent Quotes: Quote Up0 | Quote Down0
Dow S&P 500 NASDAQ
Oil*
Gold
10 Yr
0.00%
%
%
%
Data delayed 20 min
Sign up for our FREE newsletters now. See All

  • Cramer's Daily Booyah!
  • Before the Bell

Premium Stock Ideas
Access Action Alerts Plus to find out Cramer’s latest picks now!