This is what happens when you are late to enter the Japanese market.
Speaking at the University of Toronto’s Business Design conference last Friday, Whitman explained that eBay’s late entrance to Japan allowed Yahoo to get an insurmountable lead. “We were very late to Japan–by six months. It was the fourth or fifth market we got to outside the U.S.”
Instead, eBay jumped first into Australia, Germany, and the U.K. in 1999 and then tackled Japan the following year along with Canada, France, and Austria. “In retrospect,” Whitman told the audience at the Rotman School of Business, “I would have gotten to Japan as our second market after the U.S.”
Yahoo! Japan happens to be a virtually independent affilliate of yahoo! too so maybe that contributed. Ebay is going through some difficulty now with phishing and pricing issues. I wonder if they’re facing some kind of crisis in the years to come.
In other news, Sony is two YEARS late entering the EMD market.
The other issue they face is sorting out their abominable customer service. I doubt that would have won them much favour in Japan. Interesting to contrast the speed with which Yahoo Japan moved to set up a call centre after they had complaints about email support. eBay is only getting around to it now. I am having a fight with eBay’s US arm at the moment because part of their new anti-fraud initiative appears to be suspending accounts that have “unconfirmable” information after a post-sign-up check — which I suspect is going to affect a lot of non-US users signing up from now on. Getting your account unfrozen, as I found out after two days and four emails to them, requires you to fax them a form that gives your address and other information along with a declaration “under penalty of perjury” that it is correct, along with a credit card bill and a copy of a government-issued ID. In short, their pledge to improve customer service within 90 days appears to be getting off to a slow start 😉