eBay

With toy store shelves and television commercials chock full of eye-popping video games and fancy tech playthings, it came as a surprise to many that some of the hottest toys this holiday season were inexpensive, relatively low-tech battery-powered hamsters imported from China called Zhu Zhu Pets. The fuzzy toy rodents manufactured by Cepia LLC, which came in models with names like "Num Nums" and "Mr. Squiggles," could barely stay on shelves for most of the end of 2009, and nobody really saw it coming.

For avid eBay sellers, it was the perfect recipe for profits--if they … Read more

The court case between eBay and Craigslist is increasingly beginning to seem as if it was scripted by John Grisham. It's the little guy against the big machine.

Craigslist would like us to dedicate all our sympathy to its cause, as it describes its dealings with the big, bad wolf, aka eBay. Or, as Monday's court session heard, the big, bad she-wolf.

Jim Buckmaster, Craigslist's CEO, told the court that Garrett Price, an eBay executive, had written him an e-mail that waved a large rainbow-colored warning flag, according to a Reuters story.

"He said he needed … Read more

When rich people sue rich people, it often seems that the only possible winners can be rich people.

Which perhaps doesn't engage the emotions of spectators quite as much as, say, when rich people are caught with their plus fours around their ankles.

Still, the current lawsuit between eBay and Craigslist does offer a small window into our own daily lives. You know, the one through which we decide whether we believe what someone is telling us.

This legal spatula is being flipped in Delaware Chancery Court, its essence revolving around how much of Craigslist eBay really owns. Is … Read more

The 2009 holiday season thus far is revealing much stronger online sales figures than what was witnessed in 2008, market-research firm ComScore announced late Wednesday.

According to the company, which has monitored spending for the first 30 days of the November-December shopping season, sales are up 3 percent to $12.26 billion, compared to the same period in 2008. Cyber Monday sales hit $887 million in online spending, tallying a 5 percent gain over the same day last year. That amount also matched "the biggest spending day on record, December 9, 2008."

"We've seen an encouraging … Read more

eBay is criticizing a French court's ruling that orders the company to pay a $2.55 million fine to European conglomerate LVMH.

The auction giant and its European unit were fined 1.7 million euros on Monday by the Commercial Court of Paris, which ruled that the company violated a 2008 court order by not preventing the sale of legitimate LVMH perfumes and cosmetics. LVMH's brands include Christian Dior, Guerlain, and Givenchy perfumes.

In June 2008, the Commercial Court fined eBay $61 million in a lawsuit filed by the conglomerate, which is officially known as LVMH Moet Hennessy … Read more

RIM's BlackBerry App World is slowly but surely gaining ground as a storefront for distributing BlackBerry applications. eBay is the latest major company to forge a presence in the storefront, in the form of an eBay app for BlackBerry auctioneers in the U.S. and Canada.

The official eBay for BlackBerry application, which was co-developed by eBay and RIM, includes features to search for, track, and buy an item from the smartphone. Unsurprisingly, the eBay app accepts PayPal payments--PayPal has not only been an eBay company since 2002, it is also currently the only payment system for purchasing BlackBerry … Read more

eBay is playing virtual Santa this holiday season with a free "Deals" app for the iPhone that leads consumers to the better buys on the auction site.

Launched Tuesday, eBay Deals is designed to deliver a stream of the best deals on the site from across hundreds of millions of listings. Like eBay Mobile, the company's regular iPhone app, Deals lets you search, shop, and pay for your items from your iPhone or iPod Touch.

All featured deals spotlight items with no bids, no reserve price, free or fixed-rate shipping, and less than four hours remaining to … Read more

eBay on Sunday confirmed that a "technical issue" had caused search queries on the auction site to be messed up over the weekend, resulting in limited or no search results. The company says that it's being cautious, though, and is holding back on some advanced search features until the issue is fully solved.

"We are happy to report that critical search functionality was restored overnight on Saturday and we are seeing normal activity levels today," a post on the company's eBay Ink blog read Sunday. "As part of our effort to restore critical … Read more

Sold!

Auction site eBay has, as long anticipated, sold off the Skype telephony service to a group of investors that includes Marc Andreessen's new Andreessen Horowitz group, Silver Lake, and the Skype co-founders' Joltid Ltd. The investor group now holds about 70 percent of the company; eBay retains the rest in a minority stake. Joltid was brought into the investor group as part of the settlement of a copyright suit that the Skype co-founders, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, filed against eBay over Skype's technology. At one point, that dispute was looking so ugly that eBay was reportedly considering rebuilding Skype's technology altogether.… Read more