eBay Germany launches local online marketplace with 10 pilot cities

Our long time client eBay Germany officially announced the launch of eBay Deine Stadt (eBay your city) today. Together with ten initial German pilot cities, eBay Germany is launching a project to strengthen local retail. eBay Deine Stadt enables cities and municipalities to set up and operate local online marketplaces.

Here, shoppers can find retail offers from their city and support local retailers online if they can’t or don’t want to shop in the respective retail store themselves at the moment. Ten cities and municipalities – Nuremberg, Lübeck, Chemnitz, Potsdam, Mönchengladbach, Moers, Gummersbach, Diepholz, Bad Kreuznach and the Ortenau region – are participating in the pilot project. By the end of the year, German Retail Association (HDE), which is supporting the initiative as a partner, would like to win many more cities and communities for the initiative.

Based on our study on local online marketplaces, we have learned from the problems of existing approaches and developed a sustainable model for a local online marketplace for eBay. In the past year, we’ve had discussions and open dialogues with many local multipliers such as economic development agencies, city marketing companies, city managers, chambers of commerce as well as interest groups of local traders.

eBay Deine Stadt aims to take a sustainable approach to local marketplaces.  The model differs fundamentally from the many attempts at local marketplaces that have failed to convince in recent years for a variety of reasons. eBay provides the cities with a local marketplace that can be set up quickly and customized on the basis of a “plug & play” model, thus freeing the cities from the costly investments and extensive know-how development that were associated with setting up their own solutions.

Merchants selling on the platform benefit from the fact that they’re not only listed and selling on their local marketplace, but also on ebay.de at the same time.  This massively increases the online reach of their assortments and thus their sales opportunities. In addition, eBay also brings along many local merchants who were already selling on eBay before and can now do the same on their local marketplace. Thus, eBay enables a quick start, as a critical mass of merchants and assortment is already available for each city. For all local merchants who are new to “eBay Deine Stadt”, eBay offers a comprehensive six-month starter program.

As experts in e-commerce innovation and online marketplaces, our eStrategy Consulting team supports and advises the project from the initial idea, through strategic and conceptual development, to implementation and managing the collaboration with all cities and municipalities. Based on our study on local online marketplaces, we have learned from the challenges of existing approaches and developed a sustainable model for a local online marketplace for eBay. In the past year, we’ve had discussions and open dialogues with many local multipliers such as economic development agencies, city marketing companies, city managers, chambers of commerce as well as interest groups of local traders. We look forward to further developing the pilot into a sustainable local online marketplace – together with eBay.de and many other cities and communities.

Learn more about our previous projects on online marketplaces.