Skype Not Enough To Save eBay In China

Failures

from the shocking,-yes? dept

As you may recall, one of the big reasons given for eBay shelling out billions of dollars to buy Skype last year was that Skype was big in China and somehow (no one ever explained how), that would help get more people in China using eBay. Not surprisingly, that never happened. Rather, as many pointed out before the merger, China has been pretty proactive in blocking VoIP services and (more importantly) there’s simply no reason to think that because you use Skype you’d be any more likely to use eBay. So, it should come as little surprise that eBay is shutting down their Chinese efforts, and handing control over to a local Chinese company they’ll partner with going forward. So much for that plan.