Yahoo to close auction site in U.S. after failing to catch EBay

May 10, 2007 - 0:0
San Francisco (Bloomberg) -- Yahoo! Inc., owner of the most-visited U.S. Website, will close its online auctions site in the U.S. after it failed to match the popularity of EBay Inc.

The site will stop taking listings on June 3 and the last day of bidding will be June 16, Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo said on the site. Yahoo will continue to run auctions sites in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan.

The closure comes less than a week after Yahoo said it would shutter the Yahoo Photo service to focus on its faster-growing Flickr site. Chief Executive Officer Terry Semel reorganized Yahoo last year into three units to make it a nimbler competitor to Google Inc. Yahoo executives have said the company has too many competing products. Yahoo said it plans to close the site to “better serve our valued customers through other Yahoo products.”

EBay had more than 60 million U.S. visitors in March, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, which tracks Web use. Bidz Inc. was second with 1.76 million users. Yahoo's site had fewer than 330,000 visitors, the minimum threshold that Nielsen uses for its measurements.

Shares of Yahoo rose 3 cents to $30.41 Tuesday in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. They have climbed 19 percent this year.