As a avid eBay customer I am pretty relieved. I buy 2-3 items a month and was selling for the last 2 years on the platform. It's come such a long way and is really a great, streamlined experience. Of course I'm sure folks that make their living off their stores & sales will have different opinions, but I'd say as a routine customer and seller it doesn't need an external company's takeover pressure on it.
I buy and sell through eBay about once a month and I agree. eBay isn't perfect but over several hundred transactions and a few disputes that were settled fairly I've had a good experience. I know it's possible to have a bad experience and I'm not discounting those stories, but it's not the standard eBay experience.
GameStop was trying to do a Private Equity style takeover. Everyone hates it when PE companies do that, but GameStop is an lol memestock so that fact was overlooked with all of the to the moon comments. I do not want any platform I use being taken over by in a highly leveraged takeover, especially not by GameStop.
Not parent, if you want to sell an old original video game you know has value, it's either the proper collector channel (slow, super involved, higher pay), the generic resale channels (fast, no effort, lowest amount possible) or ebay (relatively fast, a bit involved but not too much, pay depends on how good you defined the product).
I had some old stuff around that Mr everyday might find (eg pristine original Gameboy Pokémon cartridge without box), and quick resale would give me 10 euro, involved resale would ask me hours and hours of work ebay allowed me to sale for 120+euro spending 1h on the description and picture (to show the scratch etc).
Another case is "oh you have the msi ge77vx4 laotop and you look for the plastic keyboard map in azerty? You can pay a 500e rma if they even allow it or buy the piece for 20e on ebay and fix it yourself"
Ymmv but it has a specific place that no one really have right now
I was selling NES/SNES games + boxes. After ~2 years of sporadic sales, I ended up just offloading them to a guy who has a huge used games outpost at a flea market.
I buy a mix of things: clothes, watches, and usually tiles from my favorite pottery in Michigan: Pewabic.
I backed into my garage stupidly and broke my RAV4's side mirror. I found a guy in Japan who was selling the exact part I needed (the cover for the mirror matching my paint color), OEM for $50. It's like Craigslist but global on eBay. Never change.
I frequently buy project car stuff on Ebay. You can find OE stuff with the part numbers scratched off that must have "fallen off the assembly line" pretty easily. Easily a few items per month between that and computer parts!
There's a lot of low volume and niche stuff sold by industrial ecommerce (grainger, Mcmaster, etc) and sites specializing in a given niche that those sellers cross list to eBay (the higher volume stuff is typically sold on Amazon)
I'm the same way as OP. I'll go clean out my basement, find a load of old tech and just put it up in a bundle or sell it individually for dirt cheap. Likewise, I buy a lot of stuff like minimal wallets, micro-electronics like charging cables, dongles for my work laptop, phone cases. Just typically a lot of knick knacks or older tech stuff. There's a booming economy for old walkmans and cd players. Same thing with higher end audio stuff like older DAC's, speakers, amps. A lot of unique stuff you can't find on Amazon or elsewhere.
I really thought it was going to be the other way around.
I am quite confident that if GameStop bought eBay, they would ruin it in the same way that K-Mart buying Sears ruined that company.
I could be wrong, I'm not a business person, but it seems kind of obvious that a company like GameStop, whose current existence appears to be due to a weird short squeeze anomaly, is not a sustainable business.
The TD Bank securities commitment of 20B to finance the deal and GameStop having a market cap far below the acquisition cost suggests that buying eBay would’ve been very problematic and risky for investors. But comparing it to K mart buying sears isn’t really accurate to me.
Like yeah, GameStop clearly fits into the death of retail, and acquiring eBay does increase their market visibility or presence. Beyond that, what ebay/GS could’ve gained is way different and arguably more substantial than what acquiring Sears did for either company involved. Atleast here, one operates storefronts for second hand transactions and the other expressly doesn’t. There is definitely money in that.
If eBay thought having storefronts would be advantageous, they would have them. It doesn't make a lot of sense for eBay to merge with Gamestop only for the combined entity to decide that the most sensible first thing to do is close all the Gamestop locations.
The physical Gamestop locations are also horrifically overprovisioned to be an eBay storefront. Many companies have already experimented with things like "lockers" which seem to be successful enough to hang around, probably because the costs are low enough they don't need to do much to justify themselves and they don't need dedicated store fronts. If they want better assurance that the things being shipped are what the sellers claim they are a partnership with UPS or Fedex and their wide variety of existing storefronts that are already provisioned with everything you need to ship almost anything makes orders of magnitude more sense, and nobody has to "acquire" the other to make that work, without the square footage of a Gamestop location.
GameStop's idea behind using their physical locations isn't for ease of shipping so much as ease of verification. People buying brand-name stuff off eBay (and Vinted, etc) pay for verification services to make sure that it's real. The idea - which is the only good/sane part of this entire takeover proposal - is to have retail locations that do the verification in person instead of shipping items to a central location for verification on sale.
But if eBay thought that would bring in more sales, I doubt it would be hard to find empty retail outlets in every city/town in the US and Europe since high street retail has been on a death spiral for years.
You can already use lockers for delivery/drop off with eBay through their courier company partners, at least in the UK.
I'm not sure I follow/buy the premise of moving second-hand sales to a physical building as beneficial to eBay.
If I'm looking for X, I'd much rather go to an online store, where I have access to several listings of X at varying prices and condition, vs. make a trip to a physical store, see if they have X, and hope that the condition and price matches my expectations.
Maybe if I'm not looking for X, and just want to browse a bunch of stuff (e.g. yardsale/flea market style), then a physical store could make sense.
But, to me, having this middle-man physical presence was already a problem, and eBay solved this.
I just don't feel like eBay needs GameStop.
Now, whether GameStop needs eBay is a different story. But GameStop is in trouble for two reasons:
1. Video games -- and therefore video game sales -- are moving to digital.
2. Physical stores are becoming a thing of the past for retail transactions.
^This. The crazy part is that in today’s PE-style system of things, the incentives…
- GameStop shareholders
- GameStop the company - e.g. employees
- eBay shareholders
- eBay the company - for example its employees
…aren’t necessarily aligned.
If GAME buys EBAY - it’s an exit for the EBAY shareholders, which is easy for them to evaluate as it’s presumably a $ premium over the share price today. If GAME then runs the company into the ground trying to free up the cash to pay off the acquisition debt, as most leveraged buyouts do (especially where retail is involved), that’s not a problem for those already-exited shareholders, though it is probably a problem for employees of either company.
My understanding is that existing Ebay shareholders would get half cash and half stock. In order to actually profit, those shareholders would need to believe that the combined company's stock could be sold off without taking a significant loss.
If this deal does eventually go through, then it might be a good time for someone to start working on a competitor to take over the online auction space.
I could see it potentially be something like the Walmart pickup service? Last mile delivery is pretty expensive, so conceivably they could offer faster and/or cheaper shipping if you picked it up at a physical store.
I don't know. I don't think this acquisition would be a good idea.
>> whose current existence appears to be due to a weird short squeeze anomaly, is not a sustainable business.
I remember working in a CD Warehouse in the early aughts. Our store was next door to a Game Stop. The woman who worked at the Game Stop would come over and chat music with me when her store was slow. We used to joke about how both of our industries are seemingly dying a slow death. Console and game prices were going through the roof at the time. Compact Discs were being replaced by downloadable music. A few months before I quit, we finally started reselling DVD's to buoy the CD reselling part of the store.
As it turns out, the gaming industry outlasted the CD reselling business by quite a bit. lol
Gamestop turning into an eBay storefront makes a lot of sense to me and this seemed to be a very rational step to take when the short squeeze anomaly left them with billions in the bank and a business model that no longer makes very much sense with physical game sales being eaten by digital-only sales along with the potential decline of the console.
They already have the position of used buying and sales, extending that into in store receiving and listing of items on eBay makes sense. eBay being in decline as well.
I've yet to see a convincing vision of what an eBay physical store looks like that doesn't kind of boil down to a UPS store. The vast majority of their business comes from 3rd party listings and the only real stock they have and sell are in the eBay refurbished line. I'm really not convinced of what a successful eBay store would even be there for.
I've seen some say for authentication but staffing employees able to perform that authentication at even a fraction of existing GameStop stores would be extremely expensive (unless it's terrible authentication) so it again devolves to basically being a UPS store but for eBay shipping items out to be authenticated. Similar to what GameStop does with Pokemon cards and PSA grading except you can't really slab a Rolex or handbag so the authentication is only good so long as the good remains in the hands of the authenticator.
The only small service I think they could offer is a way for sellers to certify what's being shipped to avoid contests, but having that in every GameStop store is also very expensive for a cost they currently just shift onto sellers by siding with the customer. eBay could easily implement that if they wanted by partnering with UPS stores or a program where sellers video the packing or something.
I think you’re right about Kmart/Sears, though the interesting thing was that Lampert was correct that Sears had a great deal of real estate which had tremendous value. If someone skilled at retail had bought it, they could have used the money from selling some of that, to fix the business. Of course, Lampert was only skilled at finance and RE and very obviously just planned to gently wind down the business while selling off its assets, which is much less risky to do than fixing it - and may have yielded better financial results anyway.
That’s why the popular perception is that the Kmart transaction and Lampert killed it, even though their lot had really been cast 15+ years before, when they stopped innovating, and really stopped investing in their stores completely, without getting serious about e-commerce either. That poisoned their brand, which made it really hard to imagine turning it around.
I agree that if GameStop were basically rebranded as eBay brick and mortar stores, that might work. I guess I just feel like if it were GameStop itself that were managing it then it would be unlikely to actually work.
It's not like digital storefronts are new; I think GameStop should have been pivoting the moment that Steam started getting traction.
You guys might not have seen the recent interviews (last week) with gamestop CEO Ryan Cohen. Gamestop has already pivoted, game and console sales are cyclical and hard to base a business upon. They have leaned hard into collectables as a way to expand their business and retail model.
I am unsure how a Gamestop/eBay storefront would do. Physical manifestations of "eBay stores" have existed in the past and none of them did very well long term.
I don’t know about everybody else but I both sell and buy on eBay items that are more niche but not totally bespoke like on Etsy (e.g. photography equipment or specific hats).
Which means an eBay store would never make sense for my type of buyer or seller because I would just go to one of the many other existing entrenched retailers for regular things.
I know eBay pushes hard for regular retail but ultimately I see it as a marketplace for less fungible items and that’s what it excels at. Regular retail for regular items is easier because the user experience is always standard.
GameStop is trying to sit in the middle and trying to move product that is a little more fungible (previously used games and now more trading cards and collectibles) but I just don’t know how big of a market it is when you have to factor brick and mortar upkeep. I don’t want them to take down eBay in an experiment.
Dunno how gamestop’s logistics works but they could leverage the existing shops as dropoff points for sellers and offer a pickup point option to bypass the postal system. eBay sellers are at a disadvantage vs Amazon warehouse sellers when it comes to shipping costs.
At least my shipping broker in Canada uses small retail stores as dropoff points and then has a network of gig courier delivery companies they send stuff to for last mile delivery. Saves a lot on shipping costs.
I’ve noticed they don’t really integrate with gig couriers for last mile US shipments, just a few consolidators for mid-mile (eg: UPS Mail Innovations that uses USPS for last mile)
Might further delay delivery times but I use eBay to save some dollars in exchange for delayed gratification.
>I am unsure how a Gamestop/eBay storefront would do. Physical manifestations of "eBay stores" have existed in the past and none of them did very well long term.
A key here I think is the easy gradual transition here because Gamestop already has the used games business they could slowly integrate that into listing used games on eBay that were received at stores and then add related categories step by step with collectables and consumer electronics. There'd also be options of ebay items delivered to store which increases store traffic and doesn't involve giving strangers on the internet your home address, and there might be opportunities there to enter logistics and lower delivery costs for people.
For the benefit of all the people on this thread not understanding what the proposal is for the acqusition:
"A leveraged buyout (LBO) is the acquisition of a company (typically by a private equity firm) using a significant amount of borrowed money (debt) to meet the purchase price, often 60% to 90% of the total cost. The target company’s assets are used as collateral for the loans, which are repaid using the company's future cash flows."
Everybody understands the proposal. They also understand that an offer of $20 billion loan + $7.5b cash in hand + stock in Gamestop valued by the market at $11b = $37.5b, which is < $55b, a discrepancy Cohen has not been able to account for. Ebay also understands that leveraged buy-outs are a death sentence, and that saddling its operations with $20b of debt in exchange for gaining a dead business like Gamestop would eventually kill it.
Also when you count that 7.5B cash on hand as part of the deal to me that's to some extent double counting to include it and the current market value of all of GME's stock. At least part of the stock's value comes from the existence of the cash so it's not wholly separate from the value of the stock.
The context this comment misses is Gamestop's secret weapon is their CEO Ryan Cohen who has been sitting around the hoop trying to figure out how to leverage Gamestop's fundraising capabilities to do something big
Couple of highlights on Ryan
- Built and sold Chewy from a startup to the largest ecomm acq of all time
- Became #1 individual shareholder of Apple early on
- Bought a 10% share of Gamespot in 2020 becoming largest personal shareholder
- Took over as CEO after being a proactive board member, works for no salary
You should also mention that Cohen never managed to turn Chewy into a profitable business before selling it off.
Similarly, his strategic initiatives at Gamestop have all been failure (e-commerce push, NFTs, digital games platform, crypto investments, ...). The only thing that has worked is aggressively cutting costs, mainly by shutting down stores, which was a plan that had already been proposed by BCG before Cohen came onboard.
Basically, he has done nothing except for taking credit for a plan that was already in motion and repeatedly diluting shareholders to raise funds that have been sitting in T-Bills ever since. There is no indication whatsoever that this guy is some kind of business genius who would be able to run Ebay better than the current management - quite the opposite actually.
Yeah I've never thought that that was the win that people seem to think it is. When you're that high up in the company, you have so much stock that you can pretty easily get loans against for however much you need, and write off the interest in the process.
They have to trot it out because otherwise there's not much else to pimp about Cohen as CEO and this attempted deal seems much more oriented to juice the total market value of GME to more easily meet the criteria for his recent pay package rather than a great idea for either company on it's own.
Seems like a no brainer for people who want to go into a physical store without dealing with the hassle of waiting for the item to sell along with packaging and shipping.
ebay started attempting consignment more than ten years ago, but I think lately they only do it for luxury items. Which makes sense to me as a lot of people would just send in junk. https://pages.ebay.com/ebay-consignment/
I do. Its great. You can walk around, look at things, talk to people, maybe buy something you wouldn't based on cover art or whatever. You get to drive a little, listen to some music.
I could maybe see this argument in 2018 or something
In 2026? Online shopping is full of low quality knockoff crap, with deveptive listings that are trying to trick you. Yes, I absolutely prefer physical stores again. In fact I've pretty much stopped online shopping altogether again
Maybe you're just online shopping on Amazon and Temu like it's 2018. It's 2026, low quality knockoff crap is sold in physical stores just as much as online. You just have to pay attention to what you're buying which is true irl and online.
Okay, but Gamestop has very little of the benefits of physical stores, you're not going to inspect the quality of the games without loading it into your machine, and the major auxiliary purchase available for sale is a bunch of Funko Pops.
Me. I love the experience of getting out of the house. Also, online shopping is an extortionist on certain items. There are so many things that are 1/4 the price in a physical store than they are online due to shipping and logistics.
Well if you’ve seen the CNBC interview with the GameStop CEO he couldn’t answer basic questions about the deal so the outcome here isn’t surprising.
The interview was so bad the first time I saw it I thought it was some sort of satire bit. No, it was real and the commentators were literally speechless.
Tbh, if you can convince someone to take your relatively worthless pieces of paper in exchange for your valuable asset, then your worthless pieces of paper are no longer worthless.
Not much different than me having a bit of cash and putting 5% or 20% down to buy a home or car: now I’m a big asset and debt holder and you got some pieces of paper with dead presidents on it.
That was the hard part of the deal: will (enough) eBay shareholders want to be GameStop shareholders.
eBay shareholders would be right to be upset with eBay management. eBay has treaded water in a niche of online shopping while online shopping has grown massively. Whether GameStop is their solution or not, Iunno.
Just saw this for the first time. How someone can show up on a major network like this is beyond my understanding. Literally couldn't answer where the money would come from.
He works his ass off. You obviously can't spot a bear trap :-) The lower range of $GME the past couple of years is nowhere near where the shorts are going to have to buy-in.
It was a clown-show interview, but also likely on purpose from the CEO. The CEO does not like CNBC (their history of reporting on GME as a meme stock), and his schtick plays to retail investors. The problem is to get a deal like this done he needs to convince non-retail investors to come along. He also clearly didn't want to say 'dilution' when pressed about where the rest of the stock would come from.
CNBC hard fumbled in that they didn't even understand what the offer was. The CEO put that on full display and embarrassed the hosts basic knowledge of finance. It was hard to watch.
The math doesn't actually math. Even if you're not discounting the cash on hand from GME's value all of GME's market value, plus their cash on hand, plus the "highly confident" $20B still doesn't add up to the take over value in Cohen's letter.
I have absolutely no clue how you could watch the interview and come away with this conclusion. The purpose of an interview is to ask Socratic questions to allow the guest to talk about something of which they have intimate knowledge.
The CEO made it seem like he himself didn't know how the math for the offer worked, and even when presented multiple opportunities to correct that impression, he made no attempt to convince anyone otherwise.
I imagine the actual reason why Cohen didn’t answer the question is that he would have to admit that if the combined entity issued enough shares to pay for the acquisition, it would substantially dilute existing shareholders.
I agree, but he had to know he'd be asked the question, right? And he had to know that staring blankly and mumbling about the offer being on the website wouldn't suffice as an explanation. It's just mind-boggling behavior from the CEO of a public company.
Yes you do. He came away with that conclusion because he entered with that conclusion. When you're already radicalized to a specific outcome, you lose the ability to perform the process of elimination.
> I have absolutely no clue how you could watch the interview and come away with this conclusion.
The reason is pretty apparent. They are bagholders. People like this show up in every thread about Gamestop boasting about how amazing Cohen is in a weirdly personal manner, and have a very fantastical view of how things are going to go -- because their investment depends on it, and they built a literal cult around the idea that GME would make them rich, which necessitates viewing reality a little differently from the rest of us.
For more information, see Dan Olsen's "This is Financial Advice." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pYeoZaoWrA Its a few years old, but gives you some perspective on the weird cult that has been built around GME.
There's nothing in Ryan Cohen's career that instills confidence to me. He seems like another tech leader that just got lucky at selling their company (which was only unprofitable for the majority of its lifetime until very very recently) during an economic era that is unlikely to return in any of our lifetimes (or our children's lifetimes).
The Performance Hurdles will be adjusted by the Committee equitably and proportionately as determined by the Committee in a manner designed to preserve the economic opportunity provided under the Award, (a) higher to account for acquisition activity for which stock is provided as consideration; and (b) lower to account for a split-up, spin-off, dividend or other distribution (whether in the form of cash, shares, other securities, or other property) or divestiture activity, in each case, that could be considered material to the achievement of the Performance Hurdles, as applicable.
Matt Levine's recent opinion piece for Bloomberg ("GameStop Doesn’t Have Enough Stock", https://archive.ph/3h8wf) goes into a bit more detail about it, including why such an acquisition might still help him get there even if it doesn't instantly get him halfway.
"We are asking our stockholders to approve an amendment to our Third Amended and Restated Certificate of Incorporation, as amended by the Certificate of Amendment dated June 2, 2022 (the “Existing Charter”), to increase the number of authorized shares of our common stock to 2,500,000,000, and correspondingly increase the number of authorized shares of all classes of our stock to 2,505,000,000 for the reasons discussed below. Our Existing Charter currently authorizes the issuance of 1,000,000,000 shares of common stock and 5,000,000 shares of preferred stock."
Cocaine (or whatever their CEO is on) doesn't buy itself.
Edit: Also, the fact that company leadership can get away with this kind of thing, fleecing retail investors for millions/billions of dollars, and face no consequences is...I dunno. I guess it's just normal now. Lawlessness, bribery, favors to the right politicians, lying without hesitation or remorse. People in media clutching their pearls over whatever the Gen Z kids are getting up to on TikTok while this shit is going on is just the icing on the cake.
I mean they make a good point -- ebay isn't a serious company anymore. It really needs someone with a vision to rebuild it. That its limping along and executives are essentially bleeding a previously valuable internet asset dry is kind of sad.
They're doing a terrible job of preventing scams. Right now there are hundreds of listings for GPUs at too-good-to-be-true prices from sellers with 0 feedback or, worse, from old accounts with positive feedback that have obviously been taken over by scammers (all the feedback is from years ago and about unrelated products). Trust is what eBay brings to the table, when they cede that to scammers, they stop being useful...I can get scammed on TikTok any time I want.
Is this really a big problem for buyers now? Asking genuinely, not rhetorically. In my experience with eBay (my account is 25 years old), the one thing you could count on is that buyers who receive nothing, or get a box of bricks, or broken items or whatever, basically 100% of the time, will get refunded - if necessary, by eBay itself. (This has been frustrating of course for honest sellers who get scammed by buyers.)
So, if they have a ton of scammers now, I would think customers are not being that impacted, and I would have also thought that eBay wouldn’t have too hard a time getting the sellers to pay the refunds, since they tend to withhold the funds from sellers until a little while after the delivery is confirmed.
(I couldn't believe myself at first seeing things like these happening and this clip in particular, how does one get millions of dollars for such an disastrously wild interview to me feels quite off to me)
The fact that a guy like this can rise to the level of CEO making millions pretty much sums up everything wrong with the world. I don't think I would trust that guy to make a sandwich.
I would admit that when I had first heard the news (from hackernews) and read its comments, people gave multiple examples and convuluted examples on how this all makes sense and the financial aspects. I was left feeling impressed that perhaps gamestop might've been thinking something new.
Then I watched the video.
> I would trust that guy to make a sandwich.
Don't worry, we are just trusting him with around a measly 11 billion dollars.
This isn't even the worst part by the way, somehow the worst part to me feels like there are people who watched that interview and then somehow got even more convinced within this person/gamestop and publicly glaze him.
To them, I have a question like, are we watching the same interview? How can anyone watch that interview and then consider it in any way positively or anything like that, like huh, have we watched the same interview?
Perhaps some of us at first (like within that HN discussion) were/are trying to justify as if it is some massive brain effort by gamestop or anything and its a 5d chess move ,but to me, this interview showed me what the reality is actually.
This is because the community around Gamestop is radicalized by the exact same grievance culture behind the MAGA movement. It even started conveniently in January of 2021, at a point of MAGA's seeming obsolescence. The adherents of this movement have already accepted the final result as guaranteed, and literally every piece of news the world over gets interpreted through the lens of this eventuality that Gamestock's stock price will explode, making them all millionaires and billionaires. Just like MAGA, the community is full of people whose main role is to delegitimize negative news, and reframe it all as instead proof that the mother of all short squeezes is imminent. Today is the perfect day to see this playing out on their subreddits.
GameStop was trying to do a Private Equity style takeover. Everyone hates it when PE companies do that, but GameStop is an lol memestock so that fact was overlooked with all of the to the moon comments. I do not want any platform I use being taken over by in a highly leveraged takeover, especially not by GameStop.
Don't they do TV commercials, engage with creators on ebay live, and have normal Adsense type ads?
I had some old stuff around that Mr everyday might find (eg pristine original Gameboy Pokémon cartridge without box), and quick resale would give me 10 euro, involved resale would ask me hours and hours of work ebay allowed me to sale for 120+euro spending 1h on the description and picture (to show the scratch etc).
Another case is "oh you have the msi ge77vx4 laotop and you look for the plastic keyboard map in azerty? You can pay a 500e rma if they even allow it or buy the piece for 20e on ebay and fix it yourself"
Ymmv but it has a specific place that no one really have right now
I buy a mix of things: clothes, watches, and usually tiles from my favorite pottery in Michigan: Pewabic.
I buy most of my physical games from eBay too
So, collectables...
I think the former is more useful, and the latter could be anything.
The GGP was probably thinking the former, the GP being pedantic used the latter.
I am quite confident that if GameStop bought eBay, they would ruin it in the same way that K-Mart buying Sears ruined that company.
I could be wrong, I'm not a business person, but it seems kind of obvious that a company like GameStop, whose current existence appears to be due to a weird short squeeze anomaly, is not a sustainable business.
Like yeah, GameStop clearly fits into the death of retail, and acquiring eBay does increase their market visibility or presence. Beyond that, what ebay/GS could’ve gained is way different and arguably more substantial than what acquiring Sears did for either company involved. Atleast here, one operates storefronts for second hand transactions and the other expressly doesn’t. There is definitely money in that.
The physical Gamestop locations are also horrifically overprovisioned to be an eBay storefront. Many companies have already experimented with things like "lockers" which seem to be successful enough to hang around, probably because the costs are low enough they don't need to do much to justify themselves and they don't need dedicated store fronts. If they want better assurance that the things being shipped are what the sellers claim they are a partnership with UPS or Fedex and their wide variety of existing storefronts that are already provisioned with everything you need to ship almost anything makes orders of magnitude more sense, and nobody has to "acquire" the other to make that work, without the square footage of a Gamestop location.
But if eBay thought that would bring in more sales, I doubt it would be hard to find empty retail outlets in every city/town in the US and Europe since high street retail has been on a death spiral for years.
You can already use lockers for delivery/drop off with eBay through their courier company partners, at least in the UK.
If I'm looking for X, I'd much rather go to an online store, where I have access to several listings of X at varying prices and condition, vs. make a trip to a physical store, see if they have X, and hope that the condition and price matches my expectations.
Maybe if I'm not looking for X, and just want to browse a bunch of stuff (e.g. yardsale/flea market style), then a physical store could make sense.
But, to me, having this middle-man physical presence was already a problem, and eBay solved this.
I just don't feel like eBay needs GameStop.
Now, whether GameStop needs eBay is a different story. But GameStop is in trouble for two reasons:
1. Video games -- and therefore video game sales -- are moving to digital.
2. Physical stores are becoming a thing of the past for retail transactions.
eBay doesn't need GameStop's troubles.
- GameStop shareholders
- GameStop the company - e.g. employees
- eBay shareholders
- eBay the company - for example its employees
…aren’t necessarily aligned.
If GAME buys EBAY - it’s an exit for the EBAY shareholders, which is easy for them to evaluate as it’s presumably a $ premium over the share price today. If GAME then runs the company into the ground trying to free up the cash to pay off the acquisition debt, as most leveraged buyouts do (especially where retail is involved), that’s not a problem for those already-exited shareholders, though it is probably a problem for employees of either company.
I don't know. I don't think this acquisition would be a good idea.
I remember working in a CD Warehouse in the early aughts. Our store was next door to a Game Stop. The woman who worked at the Game Stop would come over and chat music with me when her store was slow. We used to joke about how both of our industries are seemingly dying a slow death. Console and game prices were going through the roof at the time. Compact Discs were being replaced by downloadable music. A few months before I quit, we finally started reselling DVD's to buoy the CD reselling part of the store.
As it turns out, the gaming industry outlasted the CD reselling business by quite a bit. lol
They already have the position of used buying and sales, extending that into in store receiving and listing of items on eBay makes sense. eBay being in decline as well.
>K-Mart buying Sears ruined that company
Both were quite dead by the time that happened.
I've seen some say for authentication but staffing employees able to perform that authentication at even a fraction of existing GameStop stores would be extremely expensive (unless it's terrible authentication) so it again devolves to basically being a UPS store but for eBay shipping items out to be authenticated. Similar to what GameStop does with Pokemon cards and PSA grading except you can't really slab a Rolex or handbag so the authentication is only good so long as the good remains in the hands of the authenticator.
The only small service I think they could offer is a way for sellers to certify what's being shipped to avoid contests, but having that in every GameStop store is also very expensive for a cost they currently just shift onto sellers by siding with the customer. eBay could easily implement that if they wanted by partnering with UPS stores or a program where sellers video the packing or something.
That’s why the popular perception is that the Kmart transaction and Lampert killed it, even though their lot had really been cast 15+ years before, when they stopped innovating, and really stopped investing in their stores completely, without getting serious about e-commerce either. That poisoned their brand, which made it really hard to imagine turning it around.
Why do they need to buy eBay to do that?
I agree that if GameStop were basically rebranded as eBay brick and mortar stores, that might work. I guess I just feel like if it were GameStop itself that were managing it then it would be unlikely to actually work.
It's not like digital storefronts are new; I think GameStop should have been pivoting the moment that Steam started getting traction.
I am unsure how a Gamestop/eBay storefront would do. Physical manifestations of "eBay stores" have existed in the past and none of them did very well long term.
Which means an eBay store would never make sense for my type of buyer or seller because I would just go to one of the many other existing entrenched retailers for regular things.
I know eBay pushes hard for regular retail but ultimately I see it as a marketplace for less fungible items and that’s what it excels at. Regular retail for regular items is easier because the user experience is always standard.
GameStop is trying to sit in the middle and trying to move product that is a little more fungible (previously used games and now more trading cards and collectibles) but I just don’t know how big of a market it is when you have to factor brick and mortar upkeep. I don’t want them to take down eBay in an experiment.
At least my shipping broker in Canada uses small retail stores as dropoff points and then has a network of gig courier delivery companies they send stuff to for last mile delivery. Saves a lot on shipping costs.
I’ve noticed they don’t really integrate with gig couriers for last mile US shipments, just a few consolidators for mid-mile (eg: UPS Mail Innovations that uses USPS for last mile)
Might further delay delivery times but I use eBay to save some dollars in exchange for delayed gratification.
A key here I think is the easy gradual transition here because Gamestop already has the used games business they could slowly integrate that into listing used games on eBay that were received at stores and then add related categories step by step with collectables and consumer electronics. There'd also be options of ebay items delivered to store which increases store traffic and doesn't involve giving strangers on the internet your home address, and there might be opportunities there to enter logistics and lower delivery costs for people.
For the benefit of all the people on this thread not understanding what the proposal is for the acqusition: "A leveraged buyout (LBO) is the acquisition of a company (typically by a private equity firm) using a significant amount of borrowed money (debt) to meet the purchase price, often 60% to 90% of the total cost. The target company’s assets are used as collateral for the loans, which are repaid using the company's future cash flows."
Couple of highlights on Ryan
- Built and sold Chewy from a startup to the largest ecomm acq of all time - Became #1 individual shareholder of Apple early on - Bought a 10% share of Gamespot in 2020 becoming largest personal shareholder - Took over as CEO after being a proactive board member, works for no salary
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_Cohen
Similarly, his strategic initiatives at Gamestop have all been failure (e-commerce push, NFTs, digital games platform, crypto investments, ...). The only thing that has worked is aggressively cutting costs, mainly by shutting down stores, which was a plan that had already been proposed by BCG before Cohen came onboard.
Basically, he has done nothing except for taking credit for a plan that was already in motion and repeatedly diluting shareholders to raise funds that have been sitting in T-Bills ever since. There is no indication whatsoever that this guy is some kind of business genius who would be able to run Ebay better than the current management - quite the opposite actually.
Ahh. 100b https://investor.gamestop.com/news-releases/news-details/202...
Working for no salary is almost never charitable and is almost always just part of a larger tax avoidance scheme.
In 2026? Online shopping is full of low quality knockoff crap, with deveptive listings that are trying to trick you. Yes, I absolutely prefer physical stores again. In fact I've pretty much stopped online shopping altogether again
So he's basically looking to launder his freshly minted meme stonks into legitimate real company stock. It's shocking they don't want it.
Kind reminder to donate to archive.org: https://archive.org/donate
This helps because google captcha now sometimes require android phone qr code scanning etc. so I have uploaded the article on archive.org
[0]: I am creator of htmlpipe which archives archive.is pages on archive.org
(I was gonna add it as a comment below bstsb but it seems to have been detached now so can't comment on it)
The interview was so bad the first time I saw it I thought it was some sort of satire bit. No, it was real and the commentators were literally speechless.
Not much different than me having a bit of cash and putting 5% or 20% down to buy a home or car: now I’m a big asset and debt holder and you got some pieces of paper with dead presidents on it.
That was the hard part of the deal: will (enough) eBay shareholders want to be GameStop shareholders.
eBay shareholders would be right to be upset with eBay management. eBay has treaded water in a niche of online shopping while online shopping has grown massively. Whether GameStop is their solution or not, Iunno.
Drugs might explain many things.
(Dilute the religious share holders to have them finance the deal)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bmj2PaxX24E
The CEO made it seem like he himself didn't know how the math for the offer worked, and even when presented multiple opportunities to correct that impression, he made no attempt to convince anyone otherwise.
The reason is pretty apparent. They are bagholders. People like this show up in every thread about Gamestop boasting about how amazing Cohen is in a weirdly personal manner, and have a very fantastical view of how things are going to go -- because their investment depends on it, and they built a literal cult around the idea that GME would make them rich, which necessitates viewing reality a little differently from the rest of us.
GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen gets a performance pay if the market cap goes up:
> The total award consists of stock options to purchase 171,537,327 shares of the Company's Class A common stock at a price of $20.66 per share.
Swallowing a new company, even if it takes on debt, can bump this up.eBay market cap is $48B.
https://investor.gamestop.com/news-releases/news-details/202...
Probably more people than ever have thought of starting a shopping search on eBay than ever (outside pandemic shortages).
https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001326380/0...
"We are asking our stockholders to approve an amendment to our Third Amended and Restated Certificate of Incorporation, as amended by the Certificate of Amendment dated June 2, 2022 (the “Existing Charter”), to increase the number of authorized shares of our common stock to 2,500,000,000, and correspondingly increase the number of authorized shares of all classes of our stock to 2,505,000,000 for the reasons discussed below. Our Existing Charter currently authorizes the issuance of 1,000,000,000 shares of common stock and 5,000,000 shares of preferred stock."
Edit: Also, the fact that company leadership can get away with this kind of thing, fleecing retail investors for millions/billions of dollars, and face no consequences is...I dunno. I guess it's just normal now. Lawlessness, bribery, favors to the right politicians, lying without hesitation or remorse. People in media clutching their pearls over whatever the Gen Z kids are getting up to on TikTok while this shit is going on is just the icing on the cake.
eBay’s biggest issue is their declining online shopping marketshare. They’ve gone from owning nearly the entire market to just losing it.
So, if they have a ton of scammers now, I would think customers are not being that impacted, and I would have also thought that eBay wouldn’t have too hard a time getting the sellers to pay the refunds, since they tend to withhold the funds from sellers until a little while after the delivery is confirmed.
(I couldn't believe myself at first seeing things like these happening and this clip in particular, how does one get millions of dollars for such an disastrously wild interview to me feels quite off to me)
Then I watched the video.
> I would trust that guy to make a sandwich.
Don't worry, we are just trusting him with around a measly 11 billion dollars.
This isn't even the worst part by the way, somehow the worst part to me feels like there are people who watched that interview and then somehow got even more convinced within this person/gamestop and publicly glaze him.
To them, I have a question like, are we watching the same interview? How can anyone watch that interview and then consider it in any way positively or anything like that, like huh, have we watched the same interview?
Perhaps some of us at first (like within that HN discussion) were/are trying to justify as if it is some massive brain effort by gamestop or anything and its a 5d chess move ,but to me, this interview showed me what the reality is actually.