“Canadians are traditionally penny pinchers, which manifests itself in consumer buying differences,” said Warren Shiau, consulting director of buyer behavior research at the market analysis firm IDC Canada. “Kijiji has no fees for anything outside of a few specific big-ticket categories, which appeals to the penny pinchers in us.”

These days, Kijiji has 6.7 million listings on the site. The operation has expanded to the point that its offices sprawl through two 19th-century former factories in downtown Toronto. While eBay does not separately disclose Kijiji’s financial results or the results for eBay Canada, the classifieds site is eBay’s largest operation in Canada. Variations of Kijiji now run in 32 other countries. And eBay Classifieds succeeded Kijiji in the United States.

But Kijiji’s success in Canada was far from certain — and it arose less from any master plan by eBay than from the desire by an eBay official, Janet Bannister, and her husband to move back to their native Canada in 2004.

Four years earlier, Ms. Bannister joined eBay in California and became director of category development, working to expand the online auction site beyond its original niche of collectible trinkets. When she returned to Canada, as director of product, she was put in charge of the features in the Canadian version of eBay.

She soon found that the operation had a significant problem.

“EBay Canada was doing a very good job of getting people in Canada to the website, but we were doing a terrible job actually getting them to transact on the website,” said Ms. Bannister, who is now a general partner at Real Ventures, a seed capital investment fund. “We did some things on the website to try to address it, but it didn’t really close the gap.”