Online auctioneer eBay Inc., which created a global market for items ranging from Pez dispensers to planes, will revive an experiment into auction sites geared toward individual cities, Chief Executive Meg Whitman said on Tuesday.
In a keynote address at the Goldman Sachs technology conference in Phoenix, Whitman said she had been very enthusiastic in the late 1990s about the prospect for local sites representing major cities on eBay, an experiment that failed the first time.
"We remain interested in that. The code still exists. We can turn it on like that," she said with a snap of her fingers.
Whitman was vague on details but said eBay would try what she called an "experiment" with such local sites soon.
"We will try it again," she told a packed audience of investors, analysts and corporate executives. "We could have it up and running in a matter of days."
Whitman, CEO of eBay since 1998, said she would stay with the company until at least 2006 and possibly longer, but acknowledged that her top staff could be raided at any time.
"Money is no longer going to hold most of my senior management team," she said. "Like P&G (Procter and Gamble) or Coke in its day, or Disney in its day, we are known as a training ground for fabulous management."
Ebay, which has 41,000 auction categories worldwide and gets up to 6,000 item listings per second at peak times, will focus its investments in 2004 on its PayPal payments business, operations in China, and infrastructure, she said.
She also downplayed the impact of the privately held search engine Google, which some have seen as a competitor to eBay because of its search technology and its increasing use for shopping and other commercial purposes.
Ebay has been a major advertiser on Google and other sites with the paid-search model, where companies pay to have a link to their site associated with certain search terms.
"We see Google and Yahoo search and MSN search ... as actually enablers of our business," she said. "We think both natural search and paid search are allies of ours."
