391–400 of 731 posts
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That sneaker company that pivoted to data centers set the 'weird' bar pretty high. GameStop has physical stores so could be a place to send, collect from or even verify high value eBay items.
EBay is running a platform (very successfully) not a pawnshop.
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Who would down vote this? It’s true. Can people here really not keep their emotions in check enough to admit clearly obvious facts?
> Who would down vote this? It’s true. It's not an answer to the question of a turnaround, and therefore low quality information? How much you have in assets does not correlate with the ongoing success of the business. Examining the day to day business of Gamestop and excluding the memestock shenanigans leaves a very bad business. The core business has declining revenue - net sales 2016 $8.6b, 2025 $3.5b and still in…
Important background: https://investor.gamestop.com/news-releases/news-details/202... CEO gets paid "only if GameStop achieves a market capitalization of $20 billion." Buying a $55bn company would certainly achieve that quickly. I'm not sure how they'd manage that (buy with what? Memes?), other than the should-be-illegal process of putting debt on the acquired company's balance sheet.
>>> should-be-illegal process of putting debt on the acquired company's balance sheet This is a basically a leveraged buyout (LBO). All private equity works this way. Yes, it should be illegal, or at least heavily limited. I highly recommend this book: "Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America"
In fact, coming from a finance background, I didn't find the book in general to be particularly insightful, and much more ragebait / policy oriented (which makes sense given the author was a DOJ Antitrust prosecutor)
Is eBay just a hive of scams now? Try searching for a Mac Studio with 512gb of RAM for example. I know it's a highly sought after item, but there are so many sellers with 0 reviews supposedly selling these at suspiciously low prices. What's going on here?
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You mean leverage/borrowing? Pretty time tested mechanism of risk taking in free markets.
Moving money from one pile to another so that you can skim a little off the top is imaginary work and is slowly destroying the west
It's only when it becomes the primary concern that capitalism eats itself.
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>He obviously has faith that, long term, the value of the combined company can substantially grow. Depends how much of them he has before and he will after, it might still be worth diluting if difference is vast. Also, why long term if short term could also do?
My take? The strategy is like a contractor fixing up houses. GameStop was the crappiest house on the block. He’s fixed it up and is using it as collateral to take out a loan and buy the dilapidated mansion next door (eBay). He’ll keep going until he’s gentrified the whole neighborhood using the value of the current business as collateral to buy the next. He wants to sell only when the value of the entire gentrified n…
Buying EBAY would be a bad deal for pretty much everyone involved. GME shareholders get diluted to buy EBAY for way too much money. EBAY shareholders get paid in vastly overvalued GME shares. And the entire thing would be managed by some guy whose only strategic idea is to cut costs. The only one who would benefit is Cohen, because it would create a sufficiently liquid market for him to sell his stake, something that is not currently possible in GME.
The original shorting of GameStop back in 2021 gave them a bit of a boost back into the green. While people were doing the GME to the moon, GameStop made more shares to sell, and paid off a bit of its debts, I think it made about a billion dollars in profit, they're still struggling, but it helped prolong their life. A friend of mine also pointed out and this made it click for me that it makes 100% sense, GameStop is…
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That sneaker company that pivoted to data centers set the 'weird' bar pretty high. GameStop has physical stores so could be a place to send, collect from or even verify high value eBay items.
Based on my own experience with GameStop, that will convince me to stop using eBay completely.
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I thought the point of eBay was to get rid of that middleman. Wouldn’t that be something eBay would have done at some point if they wanted to own a pawnshop? Not saying that cannot work but that doesn’t sound like a genius idea
Over time, eBay has become the middleman - with international shipping centres, basically escrow service with buyer protection, and rather high fees for promotion and of course, the actual sale. No middleman is something like Craigslist or FB Marketplace.
If you list an item, it strongly "suggests" a price. Sounds innocuous, right? However, when every seller knows they would be stupid to list a product for less than the suggested price, that means that eBay is enacting a collusion process on their sellers to regulate prices for products sold on their platform.
I don't think this is illegal in any way, but it is bad for the buyers as it decreases the chance that they will get lucky with a purchase and ensures that all purchasers on the platform spend as much as they can afford to spend.
Next, as a seller, eBay presents you with an option to "promote" your product, for a fairly significant percentage of eBay's suggested sell price. (Last time I tried to sell something, they wanted $9.99 to promote an item expected to sell for ~$150, for instance). If you do not "promote" your item, then it is thrown to the bottom of the listing and may be filtered out when purchasers sort by "price low to high" as they often do.
I chose not to promote my item as I was just getting rid of it, (brand new OEM toner for a printer that normally sells for $200) and it got almost no views and ended up selling for $40, of which ebay took $7.50 for their cut.
I checked the other solds for the same product and mine was the lowest sold by almost $100 all seemingly because I didn't pay the racketeer price upfront.
I didn't care about the money, I was just getting rid of it, and ebay punished me for not playing ball their way while also losing out on their profits just to make a point with me.
If you don't eBay the ebay way you will suffer for it.
Speaking of which, eBay has started changing the number of results based on your search filtering, preventing purchasers from finding the specific thing they are looking for in exchange for something that is often more expensive and not quite right.
Try it yourself. Search for something very specific and then change your filters and see the number of available items increases and decreases based on how you search. I honestly would not be surprised if they were hiding the unpromoted less expensive more accurate item you are searching for from you in the expectation of inducing you to buy the more expensive item in the process.
Why would eBay do this? They make more money. It's pure enshittification. They charge the sellers to promote. They set the prices. They charge an insane percentage, something like 15-20% of the final sell price to the sellers, and they have made the platform hostile to its original purpose of being a bazaar for ordinary people to sell their old stuff to people that might want them.
Of course, they are still seller hostile, they protect fraudsters who buy expensive items and claim they are fakes or broken and return bricks, and they have strongarmed their customers into arbitration agreements in an attempt to prevent anyone from suing them to stop their anti-consumer practices.