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.
This is huge. Congrats to the Kaboodle team.
Now who can say Web 1.0 doesn’t play nicely with Web 2.0
Congrats to Kaboodle
The flip side of this is that social networking sites that deal with collectibles and other sellable items can eat into eBay’s listings.
What a pile of pants! Why doesn’t ebay just build a bookmarking list themselves?
“Why doesn’t ebay just build a bookmarking list themselves?”
Why spread yourself thin? Devote yourself to doing one thing well, and if you want to add something else, find another service that can help out.
If only MySpace could follow that advice, they might not be losing users… I mean seriously, MySpace Video? MySpace IM? When was the last time you saw someone using either one of those?
This is actually a pretty interesting event for those who play in the eBay space. eBay has made a living off of their third-party developers creating new/great services. If the community likes it, then they go off and build it themselves.
Do you think things like “eBay Stores” was eBay’s idea? No, that was an outside developer who shared their plans with eBay at an eBay Live conference, rolled it out, and was shortly followed by eBay doing the same thing.
The question is, will the same happen to Kaboodle?
I’m not sure, Erik…
If there was a good fanbase for the Kaboodle + eBay service, would eBay really risk pissing off that many people?
Okay… Bad question, because we all know the answer (and if you don’t, it’s “yes”)… Can anyone say massive fee hikes?
I think that we may start seeing more of these partnerships as web 1.0 companies hedge against the Web 2.0 bubble.
I can’t help but feel like implementations such as this are more for show than anything else. “Look, we have bookmarking, too!” Another example of this is Amazon’s wiki and tagging features. It’s as if they simply attach Web 2.0 features to their behemuth software systems with duct tape. Hopefully, eBay can do better when they “integrate blogs and wikis into the ebay experience”.
I recently interviewed Manish Chandra, and he is actively looking for these types of partnerships. This could easily lead to some type of acquisition. I wonder if eBay is testing the waters. They haven’t been shy about acquiring businesses in the past.
I just got an email from eBay and they have just launched a new World Cup 2006 competition called “Global Instant Win”.
I wrote a post on it on Net2pt0.com
I think this will be the first of many marketing drives to link eBay, PayPal and Skype customers, and from the signups I did today IT WORKS!
I just got an email from eBay and they have just launched a new World Cup 2006 competition called “Global Instant Win”.
I wrote a post on it on Net2pt0.com
I think this will be the first of many marketing drives to link eBay, PayPal and Skype customers, and from the signups I did today IT WORKS!
Ok – I see the point about ebay not spreading themselves thin, but honestly if it works for them – they will be better off building that simple “kaboodle” feature themselves, rather than buying anyone.
I agree with Erik with regards to the the “duct tape” situation a lot of companies are attempting with web 2.0 functionality.
Too much hype around Kaboodle and this deal IMHO
Your site has SO many ads!
“Show the World Your Purchases”
I think this is a significant concept that is bound for greatness. Eventually every online store will offer its clients the ability to show the world what they’ve purchased. This would be a hit at online stores that allow you to customize your product; upon purchasing you could show the world your unique product(s). The first generic service that can plug into any online shopping cart and provide this kind of functionality will make millions. I am already preparing my own website that can take advantage of such a service. I just hope it will be available before I make my online store live.