Old Junk Meets New Junk - eBay Acquires Shopping.com
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Written By Reprise Media | June 2, 2005 | Share This
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Does this mean they’ll be buying even more keywords on Google? We thought “air”, “water”, “things”, and “nothing” about covered it, but maybe not now that eBay has announced they’ll be acquiring Shopping.com in a $620 million transaction around the third quarter of this year.
The move brings together the world’s biggest auction site with the world’s biggest comparison shopping site and is aimed at fueling eBay’s growth in the face of increasing competition from Yahoo, Google, and others (vertical search, 2nd & 3rd tier engines, etc.).
Right now eBay’s keeping quiet on how exactly the integration will go down, but it’s not hard to imagine eBay results being folded into Shopping.com searches going forward.
The diversification of eBay’s product offering is key - this will open up access to a whole new group of buyers, those primarily interested in new merchandise as it’s in season rather than those seeking used or hard-to-find items.
eBay spokesman Hani Durzy says there are no immediate plans to get rid of the more than 400,000 Shopping.com Epinion reviewers or “dramatically change” the company’s team of 200 full-timers and 110 part-timers.
Nor will this likely affect Shopping.com’s relationship with Google. They still rely on them for the majority of their traffic and that’s not likely to change any time soon.
Topics: Investment, M&A |