Ebay

General Motors Co. is ending an experiment to auction new cars on EBay just six weeks after it began. The program, which put tens of thousands of cars from over 200 dealers up for bid, will end Wednesday, the automaker said. GM said the program, which originally was slated to run until Sept. 9 but was extended, had run its course and that the company would now focus on other marketing efforts. Although the auctions were originally limited to California, GM said at the time of launching the program that it would consider expanding it to cover the entire U.S. Starting Aug. 11, GM dealers put vehicles in their inventory up for bid, allowing consumers to buy them at a fixed price or make an offer.

Republican gubernatorial nominee Meg Whitman admitted Thursday that a confrontation with a subordinate at EBay in 2007 became physical, contradicting her assertion earlier in the week that the incident was a "verbal dispute." The New York Times reported last week that in June 2007, a communications aide was helping to prepare Whitman, then EBay's chief executive, for an interview with the Reuters news agency when Whitman got angry, uttered an expletive and shoved the aide. The incident led to a confidential settlement in which the employee, Young Mi Kim, reportedly received $200,000.

EBay Inc. has launched the PayPal Pay Later credit service, allowing certain U.S. buyers financing with no payments for 90 days. The deferred-payment option is available for purchases from $50 to $199. The program is a partnership with GE Money Bank, a unit of General Electric Co., EBay said. San Jose-based EBay is trying to steer more users to its PayPal system for Internet transactions as it competes with Amazon.com.

EBay Inc. lost an appeals court bid to halt a ruling that ordered it to stop online sales of LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton perfumes. A Paris appeals court upheld a 50,000-euro ($80,000) fine for each day that EBay allowed the sales to continue, LVMH said. The order was part of a 40-million-euro verdict last week over claims that San Jose-based EBay didn't do enough to block the sale of fake goods.

EBay Inc. may report lower-than-expected fourth-quarter earnings because of fewer listings, said Safa Rashtchy, an analyst at Piper Jaffray & Co. Excluding certain items, profit may be as much as 2 cents a share, less than the 28-cent average estimate of analysts, Rashtchy said. Shares of San Jose-based EBay fell $1.08 to $29.70.

EBay Inc. said it was cutting 125 jobs in Europe and North America, including 70 positions at the online auctioneer's headquarters in San Jose. Company spokesman Jose Mallabo said the cuts were part of a reorganization to streamline operations.

EBay Inc., one of the few profitable Internet retailers, said its costs are expected to rise because of growing marketing expenses and an anticipated decline in the number of transactions per user. "Our historic growth rates are not sustainable and we expect in the near term that our costs . . . will continue to increase," the online auction operator said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Online auctioneer EBay Inc. will begin digitally confirming the identity of sellers this summer in an attempt to reduce fraudulent transactions. The site, which auctioned off more than $11 billion of merchandise last year, will use authentication software designed by VeriSign Inc. The process matches user information such as an address and telephone number against several national databases. Only new sellers will be affected. Those already registered will not be required to reapply.

Travelers searching for deals on airfares this fall might consider an unusual alternative: bidding for them online. With the slumping economy and high fuel costs grounding passengers, JetBlue Airways Corp. on Monday began auctioning off more than 300 round-trip tickets on EBay, the popular online bidding site. Opening bids for the weekend-only flights this month and in October started at a nickel. Individuals have long auctioned off unused airline tickets on EBay, and airlines have sold tickets on EBay for charity or for unique events such as the first flight of Singapore Airlines' A380 super jumbo jet. But New York-based JetBlue said the auction was the largest of its kind for an airline, and if successful, could portend the use of the auction site as another way for the low-fare carrier to sell seats on less-than-crowded planes.

California consumers are not protected by the state's consumer protection laws when something they buy on EBay turns out to be less than advertised, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday. In the latest judicial message of "buyer beware" on Internet shopping, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said a federal district court in Northern California properly decided it didn't have jurisdiction to require a Wisconsin classic car seller to abide by this state's consumer protection laws.