Ebay Weighs Selling Off Businesses After Pressure From Activist Investors (cnn.com) 45
Ebay may be paving the way to auction off some of its businesses. The e-commerce company said Friday that it is initiating a strategic review of its assets, including ticket sales site StubHub and the Classifieds Group, after facing pressure from activist investors to spin off or sell these properties. From a report: Ebay is also adding two directors to its board, including Jesse Cohn of Elliott Management, a hedge fund that disclosed a 4% stake in the company in January and began agitating for change.
Devin Wenig, Ebay's president and CEO, said in a statement Friday that these moves are the result of "two months" of dialogue between the company and investors. "The bottom line is that we all share common ground: We see tremendous opportunity ahead and want to see Ebay's full potential realized over the long-term," Wenig said. Last month, eBay announced a restructuring that would bring various regional marketplace units under one global leadership team.
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For some reason people think Socialism and Capitalism is an all or nothing type of thing, which has to diametrically opposed to each other.
While the actual problem with these ideas isn't the philosophy but the implementation, and forces who actively break the spirit of the ideas.
The problem with capitalism today, is it is in a feedback loop where the rich gets richer and the poor gets poorer. The richer you are the lower your interest rates are on a loan because you are considered a safer investment. The p
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For some reason people think Socialism and Capitalism is an all or nothing type of thing, which has to diametrically opposed to each other.
While neither philosophy requires all-or-nothing implementation, they are at the core very much opposed to each other. A capitalist system must necessarily respect private property rights, and a socialist system by definition cannot.
The mistake people make is that the look at capitalism and see that it is a system under which the rich will grow richer. This is merely the outcome of any competitive game, where once you start to gain an advantage, it becomes easier gain further advantage. It's no different
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The problem with capitalism today, is it is in a feedback loop where the rich gets richer and the poor gets poorer. The richer you are the lower your interest rates are on a loan because you are considered a safer investment. The poorer you are the higher your interest rates, because you are a high risk. It is more expensive to be poor, so you have less money to save and use to get out the cycle. While when one is rich they have excess capital, which they just can reinvest and use to increase their profits.
True, the rich are getting richer, but not at the expense of the poor.
If the poor were getting poorer, it would be better to be poor 50 years ago than to be poor today, right? But -- speaking for myself -- I'd much prefer to be poor today. The capitalist system has enabled the number of millionaires and billionaires to grow... but has also benefited the poor. Clothing, and food are all more affordable now than they used to be. Affordability of essentials is important to the poor. In 1950, food expense took
"Activists" Investors (Score:3, Interesting)
"Activists" Investors is a loaded term that leads you to think of SJW idiots wanting some kind of SJW actions.
What it appears to be is simply investors suggesting that eBay focus on its core business and ditch distractions.
The eBay site is old, out dated, confusing and cluttered.
Re: "Activists" Investors (Score:1)
I think diversification is good. Core business focus is great but too many single focus businesses are failing. Got to stay relevant.
Re:"Activists" Investors (Score:5, Insightful)
The eBay site is old, out dated, confusing and cluttered.
If by "cluttered" you mean "has information instead of acres of white space" then I say bring on the clutter.
Activist investor = hedge fund asshat (Score:3)
"Activists" Investors is a loaded term that leads you to think of SJW idiots wanting some kind of SJW actions.
Sometimes but most of the time the term simply refers to some greedy corporate raider [wikipedia.org] trying to squeeze the company in such a way that it pumps up the stock price regardless of the long term benefit to the company.
What it appears to be is simply investors suggesting that eBay focus on its core business and ditch distractions.
Possible but doubtful. Usually the argument goes something like saying the company would be worth more split up than it is as a single unit. Frequently this argument is used against conglomerates. This argument is sometimes correct but it tends to get over used and it's not at all clear if it a
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Came here to post this, the term "activist" investor threw me off like this is a bad thing?
What the opposite of an "Activist Investor"? Pacifist investors?
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"Activist" Investors are not about Social Justice. They are investors who use their money to influence what the company does to increase their short term revenue.
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I do believe there have been several instances of Activist investors or groups, buying into a company and forcing them to divest of holdings they have that they might disagree with politically (anti-oil for example), or businesses they disagree with.
Not the only acts, but I have read about some that sound very SJW-ish in the changes they tried to force on publicly traded companies.
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Calling them "activist" is a way for management to dismiss investors who have the old-fashioned belief that owning stock in the company is supposed to give them a say in the way it's run. Plenty of CEOs don't like that; they want to be able to run their companies as their personal fiefdoms regardless of what the shareholders want.
How? (Score:1)
eBay in a long decline (Score:3)
eBay is so frustrating. On one hand, a platform like eBay works best when it is a monopoly - when all the buyers and sellers are in the same place. On the other hand, the fact that they are a monopoly has made them into an awful, awful company.
I have used eBay for over 20 years. The overall experience today is worse than it was 20 years ago. I would go as far as to say that their last good improvement was probably made 15 years ago.
What is even more frustrating is that they continue to do absolutely stupid things, and they constantly introduce either bugs or degraded user experiences, which take months to then fix. And there's no way to even report those issues with the goal of getting a resolution.
Here's an example: I have a lot of "Saved Searches" set up - this is how I buy a lot of items (I look for collectibles). About 2 years ago, eBay for some reason decided that they would only show about 30 characters of the 80 character auction title in the email. What this means is that I get notifications of auctions which I then have to click through to their site to see what the auction actually is. I have stopped doing that long ago.
Then, they decided that when you perform the same search on their desktop site, they would limit the auction title to 50 characters instead of 80. So even there, I can't exactly tell what is being sold without clicking through to the auction.
My guess is that a VP is being paid bonuses on clickthrough metrics. Meanwhile I'm guessing that sales are down.
It sounds like things are about to get even worse now that the hedge fund wants its pound of flesh.
There is far less action on eBay than there was 20 years ago, probably due to the high fees (you're going to fork over about 13.4% of every sale, since final value fee is 10% and PayPal fee is 3.4%), and also due to the cost of shipping things greatly exceeding the value of the things being sold (try selling cross-border - you usually can't get away with anything less than $18 to send something to Canada, which sucks if you're selling items for less than $100). They were revolutionary when they first started, but now are just "meh".
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That said, there is one improvement that they've made relatively recently: spinning off Paypal into a separate comp
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How do you pay for those items? To be honest, although I hate paying the 3.4% or whatever of the payment, PayPal is a lot easier than waiting for someone to send me a check. I would never go back to accepting checks for payment, waiting for them to clear, etc.
I don't mind sniping, it's pretty easy to counter as a buyer - just use the platform the way you should. Enter your best offer right up front (maybe even 5% more). If someone snipes you, they paid more than you were willing to pay, and that's that. The
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How do you pay for those items?
Ebay accepts credit cards directly now, no Paypal account is required and especially no verified Paypal account is required (i.e.: linked to your bank account).
As for: "The only way eBay could really counter sniping..." - Never think that there isn't a better solution just because you can't come up with it. The standard method for bidding in forums is that the auction ends 24 hours after the last bid. This solves the sniping problem and encourages people to bid their maximum right away, so that they can
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> The standard method for bidding in forums is that the auction ends 24 hours after the last bid.
As a seller, that would be very frustrating. I really like knowing when the auction ends. Such a plan could extend an auction for days, even longer. Does this kind of method work with the style of bidding eBay uses, where your bid remains low if no one else is bidding? In live auctions, they can open the price at $10, you can go in and say "I bid $1,000", and you're going to win - for $1,000.
I've bid in such
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I don't see why this couldn't work with Ebay's auto-bidding system. You could even tweak it so that the time only gets extended when someone gets outbid, in other words when there's a new highest bidder. That gives time for the old person to respond, while incentivizing the new person to bid high right away so they won't have to wait.
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The problem with snipers is that because it makes sense for you to behave that way
eBay does as you suggest. Only dumb get sniped (Score:2)
> You can use variations on that, such as having the winner only pay the next increment over the second highest bid instead of their actual amount, but the principle remains the same.
That's exactly what eBay does. You end the maximum you are willing to pay. You actually pay less than that - you pay only enough to be higher than the other bidder. In essence, eBay automatically bids for you, up the maximum bid you set.
There is no sniping, trying it doesn't work, if the bidders understand how eBay operates
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I would go as far as to say that their last good improvement was probably made 15 years ago.
I would say that it was in 2013, when they started allowing up to 50 listings per month without a listing fee. And that was way overdue.
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As someone who sells occasionally, that is a benefit, but as someone who buys quite a bit, the loss of "skin in the game" when listing an item has resulted in people listing items at stupid prices, basically fishing for that one particular buyer who might be dumb enough to want the item that much. It costs them nothing to take an item that is generally worth $10 and put it up for $50, and it sits there, day after day, month after month.
They are making a change in the near future so that "buy it now" listing
how to fillet ebay (Score:2)
"The bottom line is that we all share common ground: We see tremendous opportunity ahead and want to see Ebay's full potential realized over the long-term,"
It's obvious that this is nonsense.
What these actions are more likely to accomplish is a short-term cash inflow that can be turned into a short-term stock bubble which these "activist" (rofl) investors can use to sell off their stock and turn a profit.
I mean, how much more transparent can you play that game?
What they REALLY need to do (Score:2)
abusing sellers, lose your platform (Score:3)
Go back to pure auctions (Score:2)
Ebay needs to get rid of the Buy It Now feature entirely and go back to being a pure auction site. Furthermore, buyers need to be penalized for returning items they buy when everybody knows they're just trying to flip the item for a quick buck.