With the majority of eBay users between the ages of 35-44, the online auctioneer hopes to attract younger demos though a partnership with teen-focused social nets like Bebo, the WSJ reports. Both companies are still working on the service, but the basic idea is for Bebo users to use the site to post lists of items they want to sell or buy on eBay. By clicking a listed item, Bebo users would be automatically sent to eBay.
The move is eBay’s latest in a series of social networking pursuits. EBay has also been in discussions with MySpace about combined efforts on “peer commerce,” which would let the News Corp. social net’s users buy and sell items from each other using eBay’s online-commerce technology and PayPal. And in January, eBay made a deal with Facebook that lets the latter’s users search for used textbooks on a special eBay-sponsored “Student Superstore” page on Facebook.
While aligning itself with younger-skewing social nets could prove to be a helpful way to rejuvenate eBay’s slowing growth as it faces an incipient rivalry from Google, Patti Freeman Evans, an analyst at JupiterKagan’s JupiterResearch, notes that young people actually spend less money online than their older counterparts, as they have less disposable income.
Related:
—MySpace’s Deal With Google Hits a Bump, With eBay In The Middle: WSJ