While Gumtree is the top classifieds site in the UK it appears that Kijiji is far from achieving the same penetration in the US. eBay are now trialling a name change to “eBay Classifieds” in two US cities - San Antonio TX and Pittsburgh PA.
The change will take place early in March, and eBay have written to users of Kijiji saying “We thought it made a lot of sense to start using the eBay brand name“.
Craigslist (who eBay have a stake in are are suing and being sued by) is of course the undisputed king of US online classifieds.
Neither Kijiji (Swahili for village) nor Gumtree is particularly descriptive, and Kijiji isn’t easy to spell (trust me, I had to look it up to check) so the name change is interesting but not desperately surprising. The decision to draw on the eBay brand is however a change worth noting.
Up until now although in the UK Gumtree reside in the UK eBay office the two businesses don’t mix, in fact classifieds have always been viewed as the black sheep of the eBay family. That’s not surprising, users selling products with no listing fees, no final value fees and very few irrelevant 3rd party adverts must be an anathema to eBay management.
If the name change works it’ll doubtless be rolled out across all Kijiji sites, the only remaining question is will the Gumtree name disappear from the UK?
Mar 2, 2009
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