Yahoo Japan Auctions soon available in English on Ebay
 

This is big news for fans of Japanese fashion, manga, anime, and anything else that is exclusively available in Japan. From AOL News:

Yahoo, EBay Team Up in Online Auctions

Yahoo Japan Corp. and eBay Inc. agreed Tuesday to team up in online auctions, planning services for next year that will make it easier for consumers to buy things over the Internet from the U.S. and Japan.

Under the collaboration, Americans using eBay will be able to more easily buy Japanese goods popular abroad, such as "manga" comic books, CDs, and products that feature Japanese animation characters and other mascots, it said.

EBay and Yahoo Japan also launched a separate Web site called Sekaimon, which means "global shopping" in Japanese.

This should be good news for people shopping for Japanese products, but bad news for all of the Japanese auction services that allow you to buy from Yahoo Japan Auctions with their help. This might put the auction assistant services in Japan, that help English speakers, out of business eventually.

Unless they somehow make the international mailing process far less of a pain than it is now... No chance.
Yahoo Auctions allows you to buy from overseas. The thing is, it`s such an incredible pain to mail things internationally that most sellers (99% of them) opt not to do it. It`s not worth the time. While I can imagine that they could make it easier to pay, they can`t change mailing procedure. You`re still going to have to take the package to the post office or other mailing center, have it weighed and measured, fill out 2 forms (mailing and customs)... And hope that for some reason it isn`t sent back - you have to pay the return shipping if it is.

It also isn`t going to help much with the item descriptions, being as they are written in Japanese.

On the other hand - I can see it helping a lot in the other direction - Like letting Japanese users pay with their Yahoo accounts on Ebay to international sellers. There are a lot more of those on Ebay than on Yahoo Auctions.

At the best, I see this as being an auction "store" service, and only for participating stores.