Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
Dec. 1 -- MORRISVILLE, N.C. -- AuctionRover.com today will announce a deal with the world's largest auction site that will put the latecomer to the auction portal party in front of the competition.
AuctionRover and eBay confirmed that their agreement will give the Morrisville auction-searching Web site the right to provide access to eBay's auction listings. Details of the licensing agreement weren't disclosed.
The agreement is the first of its kind since eBay announced in late September that it didn't want other Web sites to search its listings without first getting eBay's approval. Since then, eBay has blocked sites like Bidder's Edge and AuctionWatch.com, which compete with AuctionRover, from completing such searches.
"We think this gives us a big competitive advantage," said Scot Wingo, AuctionRover's co-founder and chief executive officer.
Web surfers can go to AuctionRover.com to search a number of auctions for a particular item and pick up tips on online bidding. Launched in October, the site joined an Internet niche dominated by the likes of Bidder's Edge, which was started a year ago.
But AuctionRover was first to ink a deal with eBay. "We've taken a very different approach," Wingo said. "They [competitors] took an anti-eBay approach."
While Bidder's Edge responded to eBay's no-search decree by taking out an ad in The New York Times blasting the company for being anti-open market, AuctionRover officials traveled to San Jose, Calif., to meet with eBay and hammer out a deal.
"This is a recognition that eBay has the right to license the information available on its site," said Kevin Pursglove, eBay's senior director of communications. "The heart of this agreement will allow searchers via AuctionRover to search our site. ... It better serves the eBay users."
But one analyst wondered whether eBay does have the right to limit this type of searching, called "spidering," which is the same technology search engines use to identify Web sites that match certain topics.
"The ripples for this kind of announcement will affect the very course of e-commerce," said Evie Black Dykema, an analyst with Forrester Research. "If eBay gives preferential treatment to one site or another, it assumes that it's the right of the retailer to limit who [searches] them. That's the question here: Does the retailer have that right?"
Pursglove thinks so. He said eBay will continue to work with other auction portal sites and that the AuctionRover agreement was by no means exclusive.
Still, it gives AuctionRover at least a temporary leg up. In an effort to retain the advantage, the six-month-old company is opening a San Francisco business development office to establish a presence closer to Silicon Valley.
"It shows how important the eBay relationship is to us," Wingo said.
By putting a business development office in California but keeping its programmers in the Triangle, "away from the distractions of the Bay Area," Wingo figures AuctionRover can have the best of both worlds.
AuctionRover searches the listings on 35 different auction sites, including eBay, and offers a range of buyer and seller services on its Web site. The company, which took $3 million in venture capital from Draper Atlantic in late September, would not disclose the number of visitors that have registered on its site.
(c) 1999, The News & Observer, Raleigh, N.C. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.
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