eBay launches Czech domain

The popular online auction house eBay has gone live with a Czech-language version of the site, hoping to tap into the growing online sales market in the Czech Republic.

"The new service will provide local consumers with access to an unprecedented array of goods from international marketplaces on eBay that would not otherwise be available or at a price which would not otherwise be possible locally," said Steve Milton, director of corporate communications at eBay International.

Czech speakers can now purchase from eBay.cz, which went live Feb. 23, as developers continue to translate other functions of the original English-language site. At present, the site offers buyers limited services in Czech, but officials say additional services for sellers and the ability to make purchases via its secure-transfer subsidiary PayPal, will be available in Czech by the end of March. In the meantime, users are redirected to English-language sections.

Some competitor sites say that, despite its entrance into the market, eBay may not be the right service for Czechs.

"The launch of the domestic version of eBay for Czech users does not change much in the way of an existing language barrier," says Lenka Hanušová, spokeswoman for Aukro, the domestic market leader in online auctioning. "Headlines and descriptions of goods in English will, of course, remain in English, and this may mean complications for Czech customers."

Hanušová added, "The advantage of Aukro is the fact that shipping within one country is much cheaper than between two. Aukro was focused on Czech users from the beginning."

Aukro has more than 16 million users, and, although official data for past year has not been released, Managing Director Pavlína Zábojníková says the site saw more than 7.3 million transactions in the first nine months of 2009, totaling more than 200,000 auctions daily with an average of 2.5 million products available at any given time.

Most analysts believe eBay will have a major influence on the online auction phenomenon.

"Aukro is very well established, but eBay leads global interconnection," says Patrick Zandl, editor of Lupa.cz, a site dedicated to Czech Internet news. "It is no problem to order electronic toys from Hong Kong off eBay at a very attractive price and have them here in six days by regular mail."

Zandl says, by the end of 2011, eBay could control as much as 20 percent of the online auction market in the Czech Republic, but adds he doesn't think eBay will detract from other online auctioneers' bottom lines.

"The whole auction market in the Czech Republic is still ahead of us and will continue to grow," he said. "So, instead of suppressing the entire market, eBay and Aukro will both continue to grow."

In a Feb. 16 statement, eBay said, aside from introducing a Czech version of the site, it plans similar mutations in Russian, Greek, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, all slated to come online before the end of March.

eBay earned a net income of $1.36 billion in the fourth quarter of 2009, an annual increase of 34 percent from 2008 on the strength of the November sale of its popular subsidiary Skype, from which it sold 65 percent of controlling stake for $1.9 billion.

With eBay's expected success in the Czech Republic, shoppers should exercise caution when shopping online, say privacy advocates, especially since PayPal has yet to be translated.

"Understandably, online crime is growing along with developing online services, and eBay is not immune," says Filip Pospíšil of privacy group Iuridicum Remedium. "Generally, the auction sites inherently handle personal data, and their security during online transactions can never be perfect."

- Petr Cibulka Jr. contributed to this report.

Philip Heijmans can be reached at
pheijmans@praguepost.com