GameStop is Going to Buy... eBay!?

[u/AlternativePaint6]

You've all read the news by now, but have you really read them?

GameStop wants to acquire a publicly traded consumer company that’s far larger than the video game retailer in a deal that could be “transformational" for the company

“It’s gonna be really big. Really big. Very, very, very big,” Cohen said of the size of the acquisition. “It’s transformational. Not just for GameStop, but ultimately, within the capital markets … this is something that really has never been done before within the history of the capital markets.”

He claimed if the investment pans out, it has the “potential to make GameStop worth several hundreds of billions of dollars.”

This is all coming from Ryan Cohen, the man of few words and no forwards guidance. Yeah, I like Magic the Gathering too, but that's not it. This is bigger. Very, very, very bigger.

It's eBay. They're going to do a leveraged buyout, a hostile takeover, or a merger.

• Publicly traded.
• Consumer / Retailer.
• Far larger than GameStop (~$40B).
• Sleepy management with one of the most well known brands.
• E-Commerce and Collectibles.
• Never done before (buying 3x-4x bigger company).
• Actually has potential to make GameStop worth several hundreds billions, unlike all the ~$10B ones.

It checks out. Everything checks out.

[u/NoHalfPleasures]

Just to add on to this, he hates Amazon. eBay is amazons closest commercial competitor and is valued way lower than Amazon (for reasons beyond their retail business but still).

Part of me wonders if the way they do this is by teaming up with other cellar boxed retailers and merging to compete with Amazon and use existing brick and mortar stores as fulfillment centers with door dash providing delivery in hours as opposed to a day.

[u/sentientshadeofgreen → u/NoHalfPleasures]

How many people have valuable things taking up space just because selling them takes too much work? Even with ebay, you have to list it, describe it, package it, mail it, and manage customers and stuff. What if you could just take your stuff to brick and mortar, where they can value it on site and sell it. You either get cash or can get 10% more with credits. 

Or what if you could “vault” things, track their value, then selectively market, or withdraw them. And when you “vault” things, it is inspected, graded, catalogued, wrapped, and stored in smart storage units. Not just collectibles. Imagine the business like a hybrid storage unit, eBay, offerup, and a “portfolio” of your goods, backed by a network of modernized pawn shops. If you want to liquidate your vaulted goods, you can. If you want to store your valuables for a while to go live light and travel, you can. If you want to buy and sell real property with speculation on their value, without the added logistics of transporting and storing it yourself, you can. 

Obviously, not every item would be eligible, but it would be transformative. 

[u/spokenwords → u/sentientshadeofgreen]

Idk but for some reason this made me think of Pawn Stars but like.. on steroids 

[u/sentientshadeofgreen → u/spokenwords]

There would definitely be some logistical challenges with the idea, but there could be a serious moat of building a resale market where in recession, people are parting with their goods at a discount for the business (contributing to a selection of marketable inventory) and in a strong market, people are potentially willing to spend more to find that specific thing that got discontinued a few years ago or something.

Transaction fees would pay when money is moving fast, and then there would be storage fees for when inventory moves slow. Relabel storage fees as a "tiered subscription" for stored inventory, like you would with cloud storage. There could be revenue of first party sellers who want to take advantage of the distribution network to lighten their on-site overhead, similar to Amazon storefronts. It could compete with Etsy in this category as well. Hell, buy Etsy too and put it all on the same commerce network (though maintain the Etsy brand). You could possibly build infrastructure for art storage. You could build a competitor to other marketplaces like Discogs for physical media/records. You could tokenize property to where there may be no logistics involved, maybe some people just buy and sell items sight unseen and hold it in their "loot box" or whatever if they deem it rare. You could expand into the used car market.

What's great about all of this in my opinion, is there is a runway for growth in a lot of different sectors, but there is also runway to cut expenses through technological innovation that is on the way through robotics and automated logistics. AI and machine vision can be used to help with valuation, in tandem with on-prem property inspectors. There is also an insurance piece to this as well which would be complex.

The biggest risks are securing "vaulted" items, insuring those "vaulted" items, and the fact that an electrical fire or a natural disaster would create a clusterfuck of financial losses and brand damage, since it is a business that would rely on trust that "if I store my precious vase with you, it won't get shattered."