FEATURED POSTRichard Brewer-Hay / Wednesday, April 4th, 2012

UPDATED: eBay has Acquired WHI Solutions

Updated 4/4/12 
eBay Inc. has completed its previously announced acquisition of WHI Solutions and I’m excited to officially welcome the WHI team to eBay.

What does this mean for buyers?
We believe buyers can benefit from WHI’s world class catalog, which provides eBay with the foundation to expand our catalog from auto replacement parts to specialty equipment, racing performance and vintage parts to meet the needs of the automotive enthusiast.

What does this mean for sellers?
WHI makes it easier for sellers to list inventory, automatically populating listing fields including description, image and vehicle application data using WHI’s world class ecatalog, which has millions of SKUs.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Original post from 2/21/12

eBay Inc. has reached a definitive agreement to acquire WHI Solutions (WHI), a provider of software and digital catalog solutions for auto parts distributors and retailers.

With the innovative team and technology of WHI, eBay gains expanded selection and access to enhanced structured data which we believe will enable eBay Motors to improve parts selection and value for customers while enabling parts retailers, distributors, dealers, and manufacturers to reach more customers. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

I’m a fairly stereotypical guy for the most part… I like my beer, my sports, and my action movies. Having said that, I’ve never been much of a gearhead and – in full disclosure – my wife is the one who has negotiated the price of both of my previously owned vehicles. From what I can tell, and I’ve been paying closer and closer attention to it lately, eBay Motors makes it pretty simple to find parts for cars – whether you’re a car enthusiast or not – and the integration of WHI seems to further emphasize that ease of use.

With WHI, eBay plans to expand its catalog – from auto replacement parts to specialty equipment – to meet the needs of the eBay customer. In addition to the catalog benefits for eBay Motors buyers, sellers will also enjoy a better experience with an easier way to list inventory, with automatically populating listing fields including description, image and vehicle application data using WHI’s catalog of millions of SKUs.

The plan is for WHI’s talent, technology and client base to be smoothly integrated into the eBay Motors ecosystem. WHI offices will remain in New York, New Jersey and Los Angeles at this time.

Cheers,
 RBH

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0 Permanent link to BREAKING: StubHub Acquires Peekspy BREAKING: StubHub Acquires Peekspy

FEATURED POSTRichard Brewer-Hay / Thursday, March 8th, 2012

BREAKING: StubHub Acquires Peekspy

StubHub has acquired Peekspy, a technology company based in Singapore that provides ticketing companies 2D and 3D products that allow users to drill down to the seat level when choosing their seat for an event. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Peekspy’s flagship product, Fanvenues, features next generation 3D mapping technology that enables fans to filter results by enabling such attributes as view from section. Something I could have done with a couple of days ago on StubHub when I pulled the trigger on 2 tickets for my eldest daughter and I to see The Boss, Bruce Springsteen, perform in San Jose later next month. I’ve got a pretty good idea that we’ve got excellent seats because I’ve been to this particular venue a few times, but because she’s young, I wanted to make sure we had a great view from our seats for her first ever indoor arena concert.

As an avid Miami Dolphins’ fan I’m looking forward to playing with the new functionality when I start tracking down tickets next season when Peyton Manning takes the field in orange and teal. ;)

In addition to the cutting edge technology, the core technical talent behind Peepsky’s products and services will be moving from Singapore to San Francisco.

Cheers,
RBH

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0 Permanent link to eBay Inc. Acquires BillSAFE eBay Inc. Acquires BillSAFE

FEATURED POSTRichard Brewer-Hay / Thursday, December 22nd, 2011

eBay Inc. Acquires BillSAFE

eBay Inc. has acquired BillSAFE, a leading provider of payment upon invoice in Germany. The deal follows eBay Inc.’s acquisition of a minority stake in the company in October 2010. eBay Inc. now owns 100% of the outstanding shares of BillSAFE. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

From The PayPal Blog:
By combining BillSAFE with PayPal, which serves more than 15 million accounts in Germany, PayPal believes the addition of BILLSAFE will provide a comprehensive payment service for merchants and consumers…

BillSAFE works with merchants of all sizes in Germany, giving them a simple and secure way for payment upon invoice. Customers select their preferred item of choice, but only pay upon receiving the goods together with the invoice.

You can read all about it from Arnulf Keese, Managing Director, PayPal Germany over on The PayPal Blog.

Cheers,
RBH

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1 Permanent link to eBay acquires recommendation engine Hunch.com eBay acquires recommendation engine Hunch.com

FEATURED POSTRichard Brewer-Hay / Monday, November 21st, 2011

eBay acquires recommendation engine Hunch.com

eBay announced this morning that it has acquired the innovative team and technology of Hunch, an online platform launched in 2009 that delivers customized recommendations to its users based on their individual tastes. Hunch’s patented prediction technology – also known as a “taste graph” – uses signals from around the Web to map members with their predicted affinity for products, services, other people, websites, or just about anything, and customizes recommended topics for them.

“With Hunch, we’re adding new capabilities to personalizing the shopping experience on eBay to the individual relevant tastes and interests of our customers, said Mark Carges, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President, Global Products, Marketplaces. “We expect Hunch’s technologies to benefit eBay shoppers as they browse and buy, and to bring sellers on eBay new ways to connect the right products with the right customers.”

Hunch’s co-founder, Chris Dixon, posted to the Hunch blog:

A little over a year ago, we began working with other companies to help them leverage Hunch’s Taste Graph to provide personalization on their own sites as well as data-driven insights about their customers. We’ve also encouraged development of external applications that use our open API. It’s been a rewarding challenge for the entire Hunch team to apply our technology and aggregate data in such flexible ways.

During this period, we met the talented team at eBay. We were struck by the incredible opportunity to put Hunch’s Taste Graph technology to work for one of the undisputed global leaders in ecommerce.

Hunch’s employees will remain with the company, including co-founders Chris Dixon, Tom Pinckney and Matt Gattis. Hunch will continue to be based in New York. I’m very excited to welcome everyone and can’t wait to meet the team in person.

Learn more about Hunch.com.
Read the press release.
Read the Hunch blog post.

Cheers,
RBH

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1 Permanent link to eBay Inc. Acquires The Gifts Project eBay Inc. Acquires The Gifts Project

FEATURED POSTRichard Brewer-Hay / Thursday, September 8th, 2011

eBay Inc. Acquires The Gifts Project

You know I’m a fan of all things social, so I’m excited to confirm that eBay Inc. has acquired the technology and team behind The Gifts Project, a social commerce platform that powers online group gifting and enables online retailers, marketplaces and gift stores to bring shoppers together through social buying experiences.

At eBay, we currently use The Gifts Project to power eBay Group Gifts, which integrates three of the world’s largest communities – Facebook, eBay, PayPal – to make it super-easy to solve a common problem: finding, organizing, paying for and delivering a gift from many to one – all online.

Going forward, we plan to transition The Gifts Project into eBay’s Israel Social Center, which will focus on building social shopping platforms and product features for eBay Marketplaces.

We talk a lot about how consumers are driving a new retail experience – right now, especially through mobile and the incredible growth we’re seeing in mobile-enabled shopping. Social commerce is a more nascent space, and eBay is working on strategic ways to integrate social networks into our buying and selling experiences.

From AllThingsD:
Besides Group gift buying, eBay has been developing ways to log in to your Facebook account on eBay’s homepage to get product recommendations based on your past purchasing habits. Another feature expected to launch sometime this year is to allow users to post multiple products to their Facebook page to get their friends to vote on which one they should buy.

I’m interested to see how we evolve the eBay Group Gifts experience this year, and how we’ll build out new features that help our customers connect their social graph likes and interests with the amazing selection of inventory on eBay. Our new VP of social commerce, Don Bradford, is leading these efforts and from what I’ve heard, is at the forefront of cool new stuff.

Looking forward to learning more when I get back to HQ… for now, it’s back to eBay: On Location – Orlando.

Cheers!
RBH

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52 Permanent link to eBay to Acquire Magento; Video message from eBay CEO, John Donahoe eBay to Acquire Magento; Video message from eBay CEO, John Donahoe

FEATURED POSTRichard Brewer-Hay / Monday, June 6th, 2011

eBay to Acquire Magento; Video message from eBay CEO, John Donahoe

eBay Inc. today announced that it has agreed to acquire Magento Inc., the creator of Magento, a leading open source ecommerce platform. The deal follows eBay’s acquisition of a minority stake in the company in 2010. Upon closing of the transaction, eBay will own 100% of the outstanding shares of Magento. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The transaction is expected to close in Q3 2011.

It was also announced that Magento will join X.Commerce, eBay’s newly created integrated open source platform group. Something I’m particularly interested in. According to today’s announcement, the group is focused on leveraging the company’s assets and partner technologies to build a strong, robust developer community as a resource for merchants and retailers of all sizes. More details will be shared with developers during the X.Commerce Innovate conference on Oct. 12-13 in San Francisco and I’d like to sit down with key members of the group to share more info here with Ink readers too. In the meantime, here is a video message to developers from John Donahoe, CEO, eBay Inc.

A video message to developers from eBay Inc. CEO, John Donahoe

About Magento
The Magento platform serves tens of thousands of merchants worldwide and is supported by a global community of solution partners and third-party developers. Magento is a feature-rich, open-source, enterprise-class commerce solution that offers merchants a high degree of flexibility and control over the user experience, catalog, content and functionality of their online store. Magento Go, the company’s hosted software-as-a-service solution, provides small and growing merchants with the tools to help them succeed online – from payments to inventory management. Magento is a Los Angeles-based company with more than 290 employees.

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0 Permanent link to UPDATED: eBay has Acquired WHERE, a Leading Location Media Company UPDATED: eBay has Acquired WHERE, a Leading Location Media Company

FEATURED POSTRichard Brewer-Hay / Wednesday, April 20th, 2011

UPDATED: eBay has Acquired WHERE, a Leading Location Media Company

Updated 5/2/11
eBay Inc. has completed its previously announced acquisition of WHERE.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
(More …)

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0 Permanent link to eBay to Acquire Shares in Turkey’s GittiGidiyor #ebaynews eBay to Acquire Shares in Turkey’s GittiGidiyor #ebaynews

FEATURED POSTRichard Brewer-Hay / Tuesday, April 12th, 2011

eBay to Acquire Shares in Turkey’s GittiGidiyor #ebaynews

eBay announced this morning that it has agreed to acquire additional shares in GittiGidiyor, the leading online marketplace in Turkey. eBay originally acquired a minority stake in the company in 2007. Upon closing of the transaction, eBay will own approximately 93% of the outstanding shares of GittiGidiyor.

The company’s business model is complementary to eBay’s with the addition of a mandatory escrow service for payments between buyer and seller. Interesting to note that according to the press release, all of GittiGidiyor’s transactions come from fixed price listings with the largest categories being Fashion and Consumer Electronics.

GittiGidiyor, which was founded by Serkan Borançılı, Burak Divanlıoğlu and Tolga Kabataş, and launched in February, 2001 is headquartered in Istanbul, Turkey. The company employs over 150 people and has more than 6.4 million registered users.

Turkey is the world’s 12th largest market for Internet usage, with a penetration rate of 45% according to Internet World Stats.

Here is the full press release.

Giddyup!
RBH

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2 Permanent link to UPDATED: eBay has acquired GSI Commerce UPDATED: eBay has acquired GSI Commerce

FEATURED POSTRichard Brewer-Hay / Monday, March 28th, 2011

UPDATED: eBay has acquired GSI Commerce

Updated 6/20/11
eBay Inc. has completed its previously announced acquisition of GSI Commerce, Inc. and it is my great pleasure to be one of the first people to officially and publicly welcome them on board.

The stockholders of GSI approved the adoption of the merger agreement with eBay at the special meeting of stockholders held this past Friday and the merger became effective later that day.

eBay acquired all of the outstanding shares of GSI’s stock for $29.25 per share in cash, or total consideration of approximately $2.4 billion. GSI Commerce will operate as a separate business unit led by Chris Saridakis as its newly appointed president who will report directly to eBay CEO and President, John Donahoe.

Be sure to add the GSI Commerce blog to your blog roll (if you haven’t done so already) and follow along on Twitter @GSICommerce.

Cheers!
RBH (More …)

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0 Permanent link to eBay to acquire leading German online shopping club – brands4friends eBay to acquire leading German online shopping club – brands4friends

FEATURED POSTRichard Brewer-Hay / Monday, December 20th, 2010

eBay to acquire leading German online shopping club – brands4friends

The week is less than an hour old here in California but the blog is already up and running because the eBay shopping season continues. The company today announced it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire all of the shares of brands4friends, Germany’s largest online shopping club for fashion and lifestyle, for cash at a transaction value of approx. US$200 million (EUR150 million). The move is designed to strengthen eBay’s position as a leading online fashion destination in Europe.

Founded in 2007, brands4friends has approximately 3.5 million members in Germany, and has held a wide variety of campaigns with over 600 top brands, including international fashion brands such as Buffalo, Calvin Klein and Diesel. The company, which employs some 200 people, is headquartered in Berlin.

UPDATED 12:45pm PT 12/20/10

Cheers,
RBH
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Posts Tagged: acquisition

UPDATED: eBay has Acquired WHI Solutions

BREAKING: StubHub Acquires Peekspy

eBay Inc. Acquires BillSAFE

eBay acquires recommendation engine Hunch.com

eBay to Acquire Magento; Video message from eBay CEO, John Donahoe

UPDATED: eBay has Acquired WHERE, a Leading Location Media Company

eBay to Acquire Shares in Turkey’s GittiGidiyor #ebaynews

UPDATED: eBay has acquired GSI Commerce

eBay to acquire leading German online shopping club – brands4friends

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