Yahoo Japan, eBay to link up auction services

[bill]

Yahoo Japan, eBay to link up auction services [news.yahoo.com]

Yahoo Japan and U.S. rival eBay Inc said on Tuesday they would link up their auction sites to make cross-border bidding easier.

The two firms' auction sites, which together have about 4 trillion yen ($36.22 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.

...

eBay, which pulled out of the Japanese market in 2002, has been seeking local partners to boost its Asia operations in the face of mounting competition.

This could be a big step toward internationalizing the auction markets from Japan. If this strategy is successful look to see a more conciliatory eBay in China soon.

[David_M]

Hopefully a Japanese interface credit card system for paypal too :)

[bill]

Hey, they're getting better [webmasterworld.com]. ;)
Anything's an improvement after the years they've neglected this market with their partial Japanese interface.

[a2ztranslate]

I saw this but would be interested to find out more about the process as e.g. on yahoo Japan auctions, the auction content is in Japanese; how are they going to present this in English to American eBay users (and vice-versa)? Or will that be left up to the auction owner to translate their auction?

[David_M]

So then now paypal is allowing creating an account in Japanese?
But there's no one-step credit card payment page?

[bill]

There is indeed a full Japanese signup page here: https://www.paypal.com/j1
However, I don't see a direct way to get to that page from the home page. They offer language choices for English, Spanish, French and Chinese on the home page, but not Japanese.

<added>

I've got DoubleClick blocked on most of my machines, but I do see direction to the Japanese site if I don't have that block in place. I guess that Japanese is still not a priority for them.