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Yahoo! Auctions is an online auctioning website powered by major dot.com company Yahoo! Inc. Launched in September 1998, Yahoo’s free auction service was intended to act as a major competitor for eBay. Within a year of its launch, Yahoo! Auctions had established international versions of the site in countries such as France, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore (http://docs.yahoo.com/docs/pr/release378.html).
By January 2001, Yahoo! Auctions had adopted a fee policy in order to raise more revenue for the site, requiring listing fees to be paid for items posted for auction. In November 2001, the site began charging sellers a commission fee ranging from 0.5% to 2% on the auction’s final sale price (Anonymous, 2001). However, after years of charging fees, Yahoo! Auctions made the decision to become completely free again in June 2005 (http://auctions.yahoo.com/phtml/auc/us/faq.html).
Despite success with its network of American and Canadian customers, Yahoo! Auctions continued to lose money from some of its overseas auction sites. By July 2002, Yahoo! Auctions in the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy and Spain had all been shut down. Users of these sites were advised to head to major rival eBay via an announcement on the closed Yahoo! Auctions websites (Anonymous, 2002).
Yahoo!’s Australian auction site also failed to ignite. Yahoo! purchased Australia’s SOLD.com.au from the Fairfax company in early 2001, but by August 2003, the site was closed after poor performance. Neilsen Ratings in June 2003 has shown that SOLD’s number of unique visitors had remained stagnant at around 240 000, while in the same time, eBay’s numbers had progressed to 1.3 million. As was with the closure of the European company’s auction sites, Yahoo! Auctions advised Australian users to move on to eBay (http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/business/0,39023166,20276951,00.htm).
Despite its failures in Europe and Australia, Yahoo! Auctions continues to thrive in Asia. Along with its sites in the United States and Canada, Yahoo! boasts international sites in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Japan (http://auctions.yahoo.com). The Japanese site has proved to be so popular that in 2002, eBay was forced to shut down its own business ventures there (Anonymous, 2002).
In 2000, the French Union of Jewish Students, along with the International Anti-Racism and Ant-Semitism League, sued Yahoo! and its now former president for permitting the sale of Nazi flags and other fascist paraphernalia on its auction site (Anonymous, 2003). French law prohibits the sale of such material. The French court however decided that the company permitting the sale of the items did not fit the description of ‘justifying war crimes’, and dismissed the case (Piazza, 2003).
Following the initial complaints, Yahoo! first blocked French users from being able to access the alleged ‘hate material’, and then in January 2001, refined the auction site’s guidelines and prohibited the sale of items associated with groups promoting hatred and violence. The company began using software that scanned items before they were listed to avoid the listing of objectionable goods, and trained staff members to actively monitor the auction site (Mangalindan, 2001).
Yahoo! Auctions is part of the major Yahoo! Shopping network. Other parts of this e-commerce network include
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Lauren Spackman 22:18, 17 Oct 2005 (EST)
