When she returned to Canada, as director of product, she was put in charge of the features in the Canadian version of eBay.
And eBay Classifieds succeeded Kijiji in the United States.īut Kijiji’s success in Canada was far from certain – and it arose less from any master plan by eBay than from the desire by an eBay official, Janet Bannister, and her husband to move back to their native Canada in 2004. Variations of Kijiji now run in 32 other countries. While eBay does not separately disclose Kijiji’s financial results or the results for eBay Canada, the classifieds site is eBay’s largest operation in Canada. The operation has expanded to the point that its offices sprawl through two 19th-century former factories in downtown Toronto. These days, Kijiji has 6.7 million listings on the site. “Kijiji has no fees for anything outside of a few specific big-ticket categories, which appeals to the penny pinchers in us.” “Canadians are traditionally penny pinchers, which manifests itself in consumer buying differences,” said Warren Shiau, consulting director of buyer behaviour research at the market analysis firm IDC Canada. The success is also the result of the company’s tailoring itself to the subtle distinctions of the market, catering in particular to the tendency of Canadians toward thriftiness. How Kijiji achieved those feats is partly a story of good timing, arriving in Canada before Craigslist really took off in this country. I couldn’t even read it with all the i’s and the j’s It also represents one of the few online brands that fizzled in the United States but found success elsewhere, as the social media pioneer Friendster has in the Philippines and Malaysia. That success is a striking counterexample to the globalization of the Web, in which services like Facebook and Google offer a single product worldwide. It has also eclipsed other companies’ online businesses, including Cox Automotive’s once dominant used-car site, AutoTrader. The service is used by 42 per cent of Canadians, according to comScore, making it one of the country’s 10 most popular sites. More than 12 million people visit Kijiji’s site in Canada every month, three times the amount drawn to Craigslist in the country. But in Canada, Kijiji is now practically synonymous with classifieds.
If Kijiji is remembered at all in the United States, it is probably as one of eBay’s unsuccessful attempts to challenge Craigslist in online classified ads.
0 kommentar(er)
