Andale Snags eBay Deal
September 15, 2000

Auction management services start-up Andale plucked an exclusive three-year partnership with online auction giant eBay for one of its products. Andale CEO Munjal Shah sees the deal as not only a good one for his company, but as an endorsement for the whole sector. Andale's Honesty brand counters will be the sole integrated counters and related services offered to sellers directly from the eBay "Sell Your Item" page. Andale got the counter, a tool that tracks the number of unique visitors to a particular auction listing or ad, when it acquired Honesty.com in July (OLR No 206). On average there are 1.7 million Honesty counters in use every week. Additionally, Andale will host a co-branded site where sellers can view their counter statistics and monitor activity on their listings. Andale's users represent 31% of all eBay auctions and Shah sees the new partnership as a way to get a broader audience for its tools and market its higher-end services to the sellers who choose to use the free counters. Sellers can already include counters in their listings, but until this deal, they had to post the listing then go to Andale to get the counter to add to it or else design the listing on Andale and then upload it to eBay. Other products aren't currently part of the deal, "but stay tuned," teases Shah. The counters will be available on the eBay page starting September 25.