eBay and Kaboodle To Launch MyCollectibles
On Monday eBay and Kaboodle will jointly announce a new service called “MyCollectibles”, which will be tightly integrated with the core offerings of both companies. The service is live and available at both ebay.com/mycollectibles and mycollectibles.kaboodle.com. Kaboodle co-founder and CEO Manish Chandra and eBay GM of Collectibles Laurence Toney briefed me on the product earlier this week.
Kaboodle is a bookmarking service that focuses on specific content within a page - see our launch profile of the company here. Kaboodle is useful for collaborative research (I used it last year to organize a ski trip with friends), and Kaboodle is often used for ecommerce research. The site launched in October and has about 20,000 active users and 150,000 unique visitors a month according to Manish.
This partnership will certainly increase those user numbers dramatically. The eBay Collectibles category has always had high sales velocity (over 10,000 items are sold every hour on eBay in this category alone) and eBay will be dedicating “substantial” resources to promote the new service.
eBay users who purchase and sell items in the collectibles category will be able to showcase products they’ve purchased on ebay or elsewhere, tag them and allow comments (all standard Kaboodle functionality). The site already allows users to auto-import items they’ve purchased on eBay. in the future they’ll be able to list items within MyCollectibles for sale on eBay with a couple of clicks.
The new site will be demo’d at the eBay Live 2006 conference in Las Vegas this weekend. I am here attending the conference, and look forward to getting additional information on the product.
This announcement, along with eBay’s announcement last week to integrate blogs and wikis into the ebay experience, indicates that eBay intends to provide social networking services before and after actual sales and have a deeper connection with users.
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