Investors of eBay headed into the end of last year with some trepidation. The concern: an 800-pound-gorilla named Google (GOOG) would give eBay a drubbing during the 2006 holiday season. The search giant aggressively moved into eBay’s (EBAY) e-commerce territory in 2005 with a product-listing service called Google Base. Last year, it stepped up the challenge, launching Google Checkout, a competitor to PayPal, eBay’s online payment processing service. The new offering was dubbed by press as a PayPal “killer” before it even debuted.
But eBay kept that gorilla in check in the fourth quarter, judging from results released Jan. 24. The company said sales rose 29%, to $1.72 billion,
Tags: ebay, google base, google checkout, paypal