EBay (EBAY) can potentially increase its efforts to provide local-language portals to shoppers in Asia, eastern Europe, Latin America and the Middle East, according to Bloomberg, citing CEO John Donahoe.
The local websites will give consumers in those locations use of EBay’s worldwide network of buyers and sellers, along the format of an existing Russian site, which began operations this past year.
[Bberg]: “We’ll see more and more of that, where we may take and build a local-language site,” Donahoe said in an interview in Paris. “They’ll never have the scale to have the full footprint,” making a system with local-language access to global EBay users more practical, he added.
Online retailers are looking at new countries and technologies like mobile shopping as competition intensifies in the U.S. and Europe. Rakuten Inc, Japan’s biggest online retailer, is among sites hunting for acquisition targets, especially in Europe, while Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) last year acquired Spanish site BuyVIP.
Donahoe, two-thirds of his way through a three-year turnaround plan, has bought at least seven businesses in the past year to help revive sales growth and revamp San Jose, California-based EBay’s main commerce site. The company has held up its U.K. business as a model for the results it’s trying to accomplish in the U.S.”
Ebay lost $0.72, or 2.22%, to $31.76 at 1:18 pm E.T. in Nasdaq composite trading.
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