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June 9, 2006

eBay and Kaboodle To Launch MyCollectibles

Michael Arrington

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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.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Friday, June 9th, 2006 at 10:21 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Satish

    June 9th, 2006 at 11:26 pm

    This is huge. Congrats to the Kaboodle team.

  2. Don Wilson

    June 9th, 2006 at 11:26 pm

    Now who can say Web 1.0 doesn’t play nicely with Web 2.0 :)

  3. BK

    June 9th, 2006 at 11:34 pm

    Congrats to Kaboodle :)

  4. Mark Devlin

    June 10th, 2006 at 2:13 am

    The flip side of this is that social networking sites that deal with collectibles and other sellable items can eat into eBay’s listings.

  5. James Harriot

    June 10th, 2006 at 2:16 am

    What a pile of pants! Why doesn’t ebay just build a bookmarking list themselves?

  6. Chris

    June 10th, 2006 at 5:30 am

    “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?

  7. Erik

    June 10th, 2006 at 5:49 am

    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?

  8. Robert Dewey

    June 10th, 2006 at 6:33 am

    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?

  9. Erik Kalviainen

    June 10th, 2006 at 7:07 am

    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”.

  10. Nathan Kaiser

    June 10th, 2006 at 8:08 am

    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.

  11. Net2pt0

    June 10th, 2006 at 11:04 am

    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!

  12. Net2pt0

    June 10th, 2006 at 11:05 am

    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!

  13. James Harriot

    June 10th, 2006 at 12:11 pm

    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

  14. Art Goss

    June 10th, 2006 at 1:46 pm

    Your site has SO many ads!

  15. Fidel Guajardo

    June 13th, 2006 at 7:01 am

    “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.

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