eBay announced today they are acquiring the last 51% of e-commerce platform Magento. This makes at least the fifth e-commerce platform now available/owned/in process of being owned by eBay including:
- eBay stores
- Prostores
- GSI’s old platform
- GSI’s new platform
- Magento
In a video, Donahoe talks about integrating Magento into something called X.commerce. The press release has this blurb, sounds like we won’t know what’s going on and which platforms ‘survive’ until October:
X.Commerce, eBay’s newly created integrated open commerce platform group, is focused on leveraging the company’s assets and partner technologies to build a strong, robust developer community as a resource for merchants and retailers of all sizes. More details will be shared with developers during the X.Commerce Innovate conference on Oct. 12-13 in San Francisco.
Congrats to Roy Rubin and the team at Magento – it will be interesting to see which platform eBay standardizes on (It clearly doesn’t make sense to have five platforms). Magento has had a hard time scaling and getting large retailers on-board and even small retailers, so it will be interesting to see which of these possible strategies eBay uses:
- Dump Magento all together (unlikely)
- Replace GSI’s platform with Magento (GSI is based off intershop which is old technology)
- Dump prostores (highly likely, this thing is a real dud)
- Keep a bunch of platforms (most likely – they will have magento for small retailers and GSI for large and try and standardize on those two)
This is interesting news for the other e-commerce providers out there as well such as ATG/Oracle, IBM/Websphere, Demandware, Venda and Y! Stores as clearly eBay sees this as an area it wants to play a role.
What does eBay running your e-commerce site mean?
We’re already getting a lot of questions for eBay sellers that have Magento stores that are upset by the move. Many of them were hoping to diversify from eBay with a Magento store only to find that strategy is now cut off. Frequent concerns include:
- If my eBay DSRs are low, will eBay/Magento now hamper my e-commerce sales?
- What if I am kicked off eBay – will you kick me off Magento/eBay/Paypal family?
The one thing that is certain, everyone in the world of e-commerce lives in interesting times! Let me know your thoughts in comments where we can discuss. I guess we’ll all know more in October.
