Ebay Bids for Younger Crowd

Wal Street Journal Online

In its search for growth, eBay Inc. is starting to go after teenagers' wallets, teaming with social-networking sites to lure younger customers.

The San Jose, Calif., online auctioneer is working on launching a feature for visitors to social-networking company Bebo Inc., which caters largely to teenagers. The idea is, Bebo users would be able to use the site to post lists of items they want to sell or buy on eBay. Clicking on an item on the list would send Bebo users to eBay, bringing eBay a potentially lucrative stream of new visitors.

EBay is "looking to engage a younger demographic in a very creative way," says Jim Scheinman, vice president of business development at Bebo, San Francisco. The majority of Ebay's users now are 35 to 44 years old.

This is just one of several overtures that eBay has recently made to social-networking Web sites, the popular online hangouts where people can build personal profiles with photos and videos, and send messages to each other. EBay has also been talking to News Corp.'s MySpace, the biggest social-networking site, which counts teens and 20-somethings among its core user base, about ways to partner on "peer commerce," say people familiar with the matter. This would allow MySpace users to buy and sell items from each other using eBay's online-commerce technology and PayPal electronic-payment system, these people said. MySpace declined to comment.

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