eBay Wins $1.2 Billion in Auctions! Good Feedback Too!

Well, eBay laid off a boatload of people this week. Ouch.

But they also did some other big stuff. Including spending $1.2 Billion to buy a couple of companies. Let's do a rundown.

1. $380MM for DBA.dk

DBA is the largest classified ads portal in Denmark.DBA describes itself in the following way:

dba.dk

dba.dk gik i luften i 1995 og er i dag Danmarks største handelsportal.
Med omkring en million brugere om måneden er sitet blandt de 10 største i Danmark.
På dba.dk findes ca. 350.000 annoncer – fordelt på både nye og brugte varer.
dba.dk består af 35 forskellige sektioner. De tre største er Biler (DBA Biler), Motorcykler (MC-Basen) samt Bolig & Have. Der bliver oprettet over 275.000 nye annoncer hver eneste måned, og det gennemsnitlige tidsforbrug på sitet pr. bruger er 1 time og 11 minutter om måneden. Som en supplerende handelsform lancerede dba.dk i 2008 auktioner.

Translation? I haven't a clue, but I am guessing that somewhere in there are "leading", "transparency", and "best in class". But all of that is neither here nor there. eBay purchased the site presumably to increase their global reach, presence, and dominance of peer to peer selling.





2. $820MM (and some stock options) for Bill Me Later



Bill Me Later is a service that lets web sites accept an IOU from customers by doing an instant credit check using a last name and four digits of your social. The beauty of BML is that it makes people far more likely to buy something if they are on the fence. I worked with an ecommerce site that saw almost a 30% sales increase when they implemented it. Now I doubt every site is seeing those kinds of numbers, but it is in use by a number of sites. More than a couple as you will see below in their site list:











I would imagine that eBay will save a lot of service fees and grow sales by broadscale implementation of this. And since they are moving toward more buy-it-now versus auctions, it makes sense.

The OTHER thing that BML would have is a ton of data on the transactions and business volume of hundreds of sites, though I would imagine they will take pains to assure existing customers that they won't be using that data to kill them off with eBay. But me, if I were a retailer, this acquisiton would give me some pause.

There are those in the blogoshpere that think it is bad form to lay people off in the same week as you make a billion in acquisitions. That doesn't bother me per se, and the price for BML doesn't shock me. The DBA price seems like a lot for a site aimed at a country with less than 6 million pop. But perhaps they have technology or something...

Anyway, they won their auctions. And take it from an eBay fanatic, that can be a sparkle of joy in itself!

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.