Huuto.net

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Huuto.net

URL	http://www.huuto.net
Commercial?	Yes
Type of site	Online auction
Registration	Required for bidding and selling
Available language(s)	Finnish
Owner	Ilta-Sanomat
Created by	Lari Lohikoski
Launched	January 1999

Huuto.net is a Finnish online auction similar to the international eBay or the Swedish Tradera. It was established in 1999 and is currently owned by Ilta-Sanomat Oy which belongs to the SanomaWSOY media group.

The main differences between Huuto.net and eBay are:

Huuto.net has no seller fees, listing items for sale is free of charge.
Huuto.net uses conventional bidding and proxy bidding.

The name of the website is derived from huutokauppa (Finnish for "auction").

On August 18, 2007, Huuto.net had more than 500,000 items on sale^[1].

1 History
2 See also
3 References
4 External links

[edit] History

Huuto.net was created in January 1999 by Lari Lohikoski in Helsinki. It was a private service until the art auction Bukowskis bought it from Lohikoski in September 1999. Bukowski announced they would develop Huuto.net into an international auction of collectibles, but it was never done. Instead, they sold the website to Sonera Plaza Oyj in May 2001. After the fusion of Sonera Plaza with Sonera, which later fusioned with Telia to form TeliaSonera, Huuto.net followed along.

TeliaSonera concentrated heavily on its telephone operator business and neglected many unrelated branches, Huuto.net being one of them. Thus, the website did not develop much in the ownership of TeliaSonera and its functionality suffered. In June 2005 TeliaSonera sold Huuto.net to Ilta-Sanomat Oy and the website became the most popular Finnish classified advertising service.