Can eBay Capture The Fashion Market?

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed)
Apr 5th 2010 at 8:01PM

Auction website eBay is making a big push to get people to think of it as a fashion resource. The site has created a fashion-focused microsite, fashion.ebay.com that acts as an online outlet mall. Inspired by popular fashion discounters like Gilt Groupe, Rue La La and Ideeli, eBay has partnered with brands and retailers like Hugo Boss and Lord & Taylor to act as sellers. The site includes the "Fashion Vault" launched earlier this week, a short-duration sales area. The fashion vault will offer deep discounts on new designer clothes direct from sellers and shipping is free. As we mentioned earlier eBay has already sold clothes from Narciso Rodriguez and Norma Kamali through partnership deals.

The new fashion site has a zippier design and an easy-to-use search engine that makes it more of a rival for other online fashion sites including Net A Porter, the fashion site recently acquired by Richemont. What makes the eBay fashion offering different is that the used goods from resellers (traditional eBay fodder) are part of the mix. Given eBay's legendary battles with luxury brands over resellers and counterfeits it will be interesting to see how this new site is received. Once the fashion site is established eBay plans to use a similar model to sell home goods and technology.

Tags: ebay, ebay apparel, ebay fashion, fashion e-tailer, fashion ebay, fashion retailer