EBay took a long time to arrive in Hong Kong, and the local site, which opened in December, is a stripped-down version of its overseas siblings. However, eBay chief executive Meg Whitman said smaller sites like Hong Kong and Singapore are still worth the investment.
?The way we think about Hong Kong is first of all as a global trading hub. Hong Kong got its start by Hong Kong businesses listing on eBay.com, which is the American site,? said Ms Whitman, adding that Hong Kong users have been selling to the US through eBay.com since 1995.
Indeed, one of Hong Kong?s early online auction sites ? emaimai.com, was launched by a former eBay stamp dealer.
The eBay Hong Kong site is in Chinese ? in common with most eBay sites, which stick to a single language. Although Hong Kong has several hundred thousand residents who cannot read Chinese, Frederic de Bure, managing director of eBay Hong Kong and Singapore, said there was no need to cater to the market.
?So we?ve got this site for Hong Kong people in the local language that they wanted,? he said. Ms Whitman added that anyone who wanted to trade in English could look for buyers via overseas eBay?s.
?What we know about Hong Kong is that if they want to use the site in English, they can use .com or .co.uk or .au, and we decided that really, to have the site in Chinese was the right thing to do.?