eBay, Yahoo Japan to link up auction services

TOKYO--eBay and Yahoo Japan will link up their auction sites to make cross-border bidding easier, in a deal that will give U.S. auction titan eBay another chance to woo lucrative Japanese consumers. eBay and Yahoo Japan, which together have about $36 billion in annual successful bids, will first launch a Japanese-language site on which Yahoo Japan users can bid for eBay items, spokesmen from the two firms said.

The companies will introduce the site, called Sekaimon or "Gateway to the world," at a news conference at 11 a.m. (0200 GMT) in Tokyo. eBay pulled out of Japan in 2002 after only two years, a rare failure for the world's largest online auctioneer, after struggling to make inroads to a market where Yahoo Japan and Rakuten already operated well-established sites.

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