Haaretz Launches Israel's Answer to eBay and PayPal: Walla!Buy and Walla!Pay

[mandy]

Israel's leading portal Walla, owned by media firm Haaretz Group,  launches Israeli auction site and online payment service.

Walla! announced yesterday two new services which are local versions of eBay and Paypal.

Walla!Buy is an online market and auction site, while Walla!Pay allows users to make secure payments without revealing their credit card details. The development of the sites, similar in design to the U.S. sites that they emulate, took more than a year and cost more than NIS 2 million.

Walla!Shops CEO Uri Nadler explained that Walla!Buy works as an open trading arena, in which any individual or business can offer items for sale. Nadler expects the new site's revenues to reach NIS 300 million within three years...

full article: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/697508.html

The market for online shopping sites in Israel heated up this week when Internet portal Walla launched two new services for the local market: auction site WallaBuy, billed as the Israeli version of international giant eBay, and WallaPay, an epayment solution modeled after Paypal in the US.

WallaBuy CEO Uri Nadler said the site would make Walla the first major player to offer a consumer-to-consumer (C2C) marketplace in Hebrew. Although a number of English sites offer C2C shopping in the form of online virtual communities, Nadler doesn't consider them competitors.

"Those sites are usually just message boards or e-mail lists, while this is a full e-commerce site," Nadler said.

full article: http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?c...9395665843&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

Walla!Buy web site: http://www.wallabuy.co.il/
Walla!Pay web site: https://www.wallapay.co.il/

[mandy]

A relatede article:

A class action lawsuit has been filed with the Tel Aviv District Court, amounting to tens of millions of shekels, against the owners of online auction sites. The petitioners claim that the sites committed systematic fraud through the selection of auction participants...

The petition states that the websites defraud participants in auctions by blocking their legal right to win products that the sites determine to be “underpriced”. The petition also claims that this practice is carried out through the use of fictitious bidders during an auction. The petitioners claim that they have gathered evidence that “leads to only one logical conclusion” - systematic fraud...

full article: http://www.globes.co.il/serveen/globes/d...1000250127&fid=942