Founded in 1995, since then eBay has grew into the world’s largest and most popular person-to-person auction community on the Web. And despite the fact of the huge success of eBay in U.S., Europe and some other countries, it having the difficulty in entering China’s Internet market and eBay China was thinking that the best solution for them is through the joint-venture approach. I previously have posted that eBay will close its unprofitable China Web auction unit and form a venture with billionaire Li Ka-shing’s Tom Online to run the business in the world’s second-biggest Internet market. There are, of course, downsides to this approach. It means eBay China will only hold a certain stake of the new venture. The aforesaid news was announced in December last year and according to the latest news (in Mandarin) pertaining to this, the new venture, i.e. Tom-eBay China is under development and will launch to the market in this July. This new venture will focusing on the Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) businesses while eBay China’s existing businesses would target in international business and remain controlled by eBay management. Moreover, eBay China will become a subsidiary of the above mentioned Tom-eBay China.

Nonetheless, Tom has enjoyed a good relationship with eBay and it makes sense because eBay’s Skype partner in China was Tom.com. As I visited the Tom.com & Skype, they have developed the latest Chinese version of Skype that targeting the Chinese users, i.e. version 3.1. For Tom-eBay China, I suspect the domain that they’ll use is tom-ebay.com.cn.

In fact, the person-to-person auction arena is not entirely a new market. The competition in China’s auction market is fierce and there are several direct competitors for the Tom-eBay China when it officially launched in July, these include Taobao, owned by Alibaba and paipai, owned by Tencent.