EBay opens UK ad site to expats in Hub
Looking for flatmates? Craving company for a Vegemite sandwich? Want to barter away a cricket bat and some wickets?
Gumtree, eBay's popular community and classifieds website in the United Kingdom, opens today to Australian and British expats in Boston looking to sell TVs or catch a spot of tea. Gumtree's three-city launch -- to Boston's Brits and Aussies, Chicago's Polish community, and New York City's Brits -- is part of eBay's continuing move into online classifieds. Already, the electronic commerce company owns a share of Craigslist, and this summer it launched online classifieds site Kijiji.com in the United States. With Gumtree, the company is taking a grass-roots approach to entering niche markets.
"It speaks to our overall market philosophy. We've always said we'd be able to provide people anywhere in the world with the e-commerce platform of their choice," said eBay spokesman Jose Mallabo. "We're going to explore other ways to target other markets and other communities -- we do it based on learning from smaller market entrances like this."
Classifieds are a big business, valued at $100 billion worldwide. The US online classifieds market is just a small sliver of that, valued at $3.8 billion in 2007 and projected to grow to $7.3 billion in 2011 according to eMarketer, but businesses are aggressively pursuing every niche.
There are sites that cater to categories, such as MediaBistro.com, a media job website acquired by JupiterMedia for $23 million last month. There are online marketplaces based on people's actual social networks at Facebook and MySpace. And there is Craigslist, the free-classified phenomenon, which has reshaped the classified world, forcing newspapers to begin to offer their own free classifieds.
Mallabo said that eBay decided to bring Gumtree to America at the behest of users who love the brand and has chosen specific demographics in each city to target, although the website will be accessible to anyone. Gumtree is operating in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Poland.
Gumtree began in 2000 as a website for people living in London, but began to spread more popularly, now ranking as the 19th most popular website in the United Kingdom, according to Alexa, a Web information company.
"It became a tight-knit and trusted community and snowballed from that -- lots of nannies and jobs that these communities are filling that people in the UK began realizing they could get on Gumtree," said Sophy Silver, a spokeswoman for Gumtree.
Mallabo said the launch will be a test for eBay, which has been expanding beyond its traditional market. This summer, eBay opened Kijiji -- a potential Craigslist rival targeted at young professionals and families -- to users in the United States, and was pleased with the success.
Peter M. Zollman, founding principal of Classified Intelligence, said that sense of community is one reason for the success that drove Craigslist and other online communities.
"There are a lot of like-minded people who went to that site early on, and built essentially the ethos of Craigslist," he said. "People tend to want to participate in communities of interest," whether they are geographical or interest-based. "If there is enough critical mass in those communities, these sites can be very valuable and successful for users. Clearly, that's what eBay is trying to exploit."
The Brit expat population in New England is estimated at more than 63,000, according to the British Consulate. The 2000 Census counted 2,300 Australians and New Zealanders in Massachusetts.
But it remains to be seen whether nationality really matters when a person is searching for a couch, a flatmate, or someone to cuddle with.
"There's been a lot of growth in free classifieds -- Craigslist is absolutely the killer," Zollman said. "But eBay is essentially willing to cannibalize itself rather than let someone else."
Carolyn Y. Johnson can be reached at cjohnson@globe.com. 
