GameStop Preparing Offer for eBay(wsj.com) |
GameStop Preparing Offer for eBay(wsj.com) |
> Details of the potential offer for eBay couldn’t be learned.
This appears to be an attention stunt, of which Cohen has done a few since GME became a meme stock.
Some unknown tiny company made an offer to takeover Yahoo (or some similar company)… the tiny company made headlines for a moment then disappeared again.
It was an example of dot com silliness.
Can’t for the life of me remember, and Google can’t seem to either.
This is significantly different, in line with a strategy that seems to have been in place since he became CEO of Gamestop.
This appears to be an attempt to take over eBay the same way he took over Gamestop by acquiring a 51% controlling interest with capital he will raise by further diluting the value of Gamestop shares.
It appears long term he is trying to build the, "Amazon of the secondhand market".
Ryan Cohen is rich but he's not that rich.
Gamestop and eBay have no synergy. Gamestop can't possibly run eBay better than eBay's current management. It's a meme stock looking to make noise so they can get a higher stock price, and then unload their shares onto the public market to raise cash.
GME has 3x'ed their shares outstanding since Covid.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GME/gamestop/share...
Put another way, if you think this is fake you could make a lot of money. Because that would mean GameStop is de facto offering the market a free put on its own and eBay’s stock.
Gamestop is just in the business of selling their shares to retail. It's pretty much like a crypto shitcoin.
If you check eBay & GME's stock prices after the announcement, the market seems to think there are at least serious discussions here if not more.
I don't understand how a smaller publicly traded company can buy a larger publicly traded company. Don't they need to have a majority of shares or enough to demand a board seat? A deal like that probably needs to have outside investors and/or some leverage of some kind.
Also, what's a meme stock? How would you define that?
I love eBay, for both buying and selling used items that are viable to ship.
We let CraigsList get broken, with seemingly much fewer sellers and buyers than it used to have.
I tried Facebook Marketplace, which is where most local buyers&sellers seemed to move to. But I won't install their app, and the notification emails only sometimes came through. (One buyer became very irate when I didn't respond promptly.) Also, their pretend E2E encryption for messages on their Web site was just annoying (like a dark pattern intended to make people hate E2E, while not actually providing any significant security).
eBay is actually a competent engineering organization
I too actually rely on eBay as an alternative to _every other online store_.
It’s curious you mention facebook and eBay together. I find FBMP completely unusable because of what their search feature returns—garbage. It functions like their whole platform by trying to grab your attention with things it thinks you might want (how else to interpret unrelated results?) but didn’t ask for.
Despite eBay hobbling their search feature by removing Boolean operators, I find the two platforms couldn’t be more different.
Deals like this benefit nobody but shareholders (in the short term) and lenders. The workers at the companies get laid off, consumers get worse products, and the odds of bankruptcy spike. Leveraged buyouts seem like a net negative to society.
The main thing I dislike about eBay search is all the sponsored placements violating the sorting order. For example, if you sort on increasing price, sponsored placements not in the specified sorting order litter that heavily, making it hard to follow. Amazon searches have the same problem. (Problem, from the perspective of buyer-on-the-marketplace.)
The other thing I dislike about both eBay and Amazon searches is the spamming of huge numbers of listings for essentially the same item. I notice it more on Amazon than eBay.
I really loved my 9-3 turbo...
It's a bit of a rabbit hole, but this is a good place to start: https://youtu.be/5pYeoZaoWrA?si=3YZ1SpRxOB9sglVG
The worst thing is when you are searching for an item, but most of the listings are those "multiple different specification" listings. e.g. a seller has 8GB, 16GB and 32GB USB sticks. It's almost impossible to compare listings and the price you see is clickbait because once you click through you find the thing you were searching for is several times higher. I wrote a bookmarklet to remove all these, but that's not ideal because it can over-correct.
I wonder whether I see it less often because my bookmarked search queries are careful to avoid things in the URL that look like they might be IDs for cached queries/results.
Also, a few times I wondered whether I was accidentally triggering anti-scraping poisoning measures, even though I was doing the search and paging manually.
This is a big market getting bigger. Americans have more spending money than ever before, especially at the top end, and the collectibles market is expected to grow as much as 7% y/y for a long time. That's like $50b of new spend every year. Massive opportunity.
I think this is smart. Gamestop is a vibes company, everyone knows it, and this is an opportunity to acquire a real business with strong tailwinds. Everyone knows eBay has been poorly run for 20 years. Even in 2010/2011 when I worked there it was running on empty so to speak. Some opportunity to take control of that narrative and grow the business in demographics with deep pockets would be huge.
Collectibles is tiny market for eBay. They sell mostly mass produced goods and random used things.
WHAT?
> especially at the top end
Ahh, that's the correct identifier.
It's an extremely K-shaped economy.
That seemed like a great idea for certain types of goods-- the market for plenty of collectibles are thin in any given locality, but it was always clumsy to get to the global marketplace. If you had a normal consumer eBay account with 30 feedback, you might have a hard time getting trust against sellers with 400,000. You had to deal with packing, shipping, nonpayment, complaints.
Handing it all off to a professional with experience and a high volume credible account was worth a consignment commission. But they seemed to dry up after a while, I think when eBay pivoted from "the world's garage sale" to "AliExpress but some products are in domestic warehouses."
If you had a widely deployed retail presence that was already used to dealing with used merchandise (pawnshop-style laws, routing items for cleaning/refubrishment etc), turning the tradein counter into a consignment counter is a potential win. New revenue stream, gets people in the door, and provides an expectation of legitimacy and predictability.
I meaaaaaaan...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal
"Deferred Prosecution Agreement with District of Massachusetts" still sits in the eBay footer. ;)