I'm not the commenter, but about 20 years ago when ebay owned paypal still, I sold 26 iPod nanos in a big sale on ebay. Everyone received theirs except one guy, and the tracking showed the shipper lost it, in that the package just stopped being scanned in the USPS system halfway through. He complained, completely understandable! eBay froze my account, froze the payments for all 26, and I never saw the money ever again.

They wouldn't let me just refund the one customer. I had to prove the other 25 were delivered, so I did that. Then I had to prove they actually got iPods, so I linked them to the reviewed transactions that showed people were happy with the iPods. So then I had to prove my identity to eBay. They wanted my license, so I did that. Then a utility so I sent my light bill. Then my phone bill. Then my natural gas bill. Then my lease. Then they asked for my passport, which I did not have at that time. Suddenly nothing could be done without the passport, and they'd keep the money for 180 days and then mail me a check. Except then they said they were keeping the money anyway because I didn't provide a passport. Five grand, gone.

From that day on I'd have multiple eBay accounts at all times, spread things out around them so that when (not if, when) they would freeze an account for a review, I'd just cancel everything, refund whatever purchase was in review, and never use that account again. I learned that the review process is just a delay process to make you think there was progress when you'd already been banned but since you thought there was a chance, you'd keep busy in the no-go queue for however long you interacted with the bot before you gave up rather than calling support.

I sold a Mavic 2 Pro drone with 5 batteries. The whole process was a mess. Scammer initially complained that it didn't come with a CrystalSky tablet that was in one picture (that was only added AFTER after he had bid already and asked to see Flight Logs, and was explicitly disclaimed as not being a part of the package, nor was it in the receipts I sent the buyer). After pointing out those details, silence.

Then, three weeks later:

"The batteries don't work. I want a refund."

"Batteries? Any of them? All of them?"

"All of them, none work. I want a refund."

Note that two of the batteries were less than 4 months old, still in warranty.

He then stated he wanted a refund of $800. For five brand-new batteries, that would only be $670.

No evidence was shown, despite multiple requests (like a video of a battery on a charger, or on the drone, failing to power up). I stated I'd like to get the original batteries back, as at least I'd be able to get them replaced under warranty or possibly repaired and recoup some of my money (I was skeptical there was -any- issue, but still, good faith). He "happily" agreed. I asked him to send me a message on eBay (so it was tracked and not avoiding their system) acknowledging that offering a partial refund was contingent on his sending me the batteries back and that he accepts me disputing the refund if not.

He sends a message indicating all of the above.

Refund is sent (for about $700, to include his return shipping costs).

Thirty-five minutes later, I get a message, "USPS says they don't ship damaged batteries, so I will not be returning them". (35 minutes? So what, you were just sitting around waiting for the refund, and then the very moment I sent the money, you jumped in your car, got to the post office, had this discussion, got home, and were able to send me this message? When your home address shows you about 15 minutes from the nearest post office?)

I then suggest we meet in person to exchange them (I live a few hours away, not convenient, but still, $700...). He umms and ahhs, "How will I be able to prove that I gave them to you in person?". I suggest we do it in a police station and point out that his local PD even welcomes people to use their lobby for CL, etc. on their website. More umms and ahhs. "I need to contact eBay support to see if they allow this." I point him to eBay's specific FAQ page describing exactly this and how they recommend doing in person sales, and refunds, documentation thereof, and how they support it. But he ignores that and says, "I never heard back from eBay support, so I'm not sure what to do". I point this page out again, and he goes silent.

I opened a dispute. No evidence was provided for damage or faulty goods, referenced the multiple requests for video, or of anything.) Multiple instances of the buyer trying to show something was problematic with the listing, not abiding by the agreement and refusing/avoiding any method of returning damaged items.

Overnight, no further inquiries.

"We have closed your dispute. Based on our review, the buyer is entitled to keep the partial refund for damage. He is also not required to return the damaged items".

So he ended up with a Mavic 2 Pro, with less than 20 hours flight time, 5 batteries, for in the order of $950, all told.

Yeah that's what a primary source is: words from a principal architect of the deal, not a vague description using emotionally-charged terms. The interviewer is a professional eBay seller, so I think lots of what's mentioned in the interview is relevant to much of the discussion in this thread.

If you were interested in learning more about the nuance of the situation you might appreciate the information therein, but you're also free to reply to anyone who provides alternate perspectives or additional information with silly labels like 'true believer' instead of addressing the content of their messages!

It's about the brand. Ehen shopping online, everyone may have heard of eBay, but how many people are going to go there first, as opposed to Amazon, Etsy, AliExpress, Temu, wherever else. And yes, eBay is going to have the weird eBay stuff, but if users don't even think to go looking there, they've lost a sale.

How did you determine that? As someone who also buys old computer stuff from time to time, I wouldn't say they are collectibles.

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Wouldn't verification for almost anything beyond the extremely basic need specialized people? I don't think it's reasonable to train every Gamestop employee to be able to verify everything from fancy Swiss watches to brand name clothing to playing cards. At least if you do it in a central location you can have actual experts do the verification.

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My understanding is that existing Ebay shareholders would get half cash and half stock. In order to actually profit, those shareholders would need to believe that the combined company's stock could be sold off without taking a significant loss.

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If this deal does eventually go through, then it might be a good time for someone to start working on a competitor to take over the online auction space.

> Pawn shop for nerds/the middle class.

That's kind of but not really what GameStop was before digital games took over and isn't what eBay is. A majority of Pawn Shop business is in the name pawns and neither eBay nor GameStop have ever done.

> They could build AI to help authentication and just identifying sellers would help tremendously with fraud.

That's a huge step beyond reasonable, there have been billions spent on the current AIs and none of them are up to the task of telling a good fake from a real item. Maybe one day but that's ages away.

And fraud doesn't just happen on the seller side, a big headache for sellers is buyer fraud where they'll claim the item is wrong/broken and there's almost no recourse for sellers to prove that's incorrect. eBay could just as easily partner with UPS stores to implement seller and buyer authentication anyways there's not a huge benefit to GameStop in particular being the partner there. It's always been an option and they haven't taken it.

Sears and Kmart both did so much diversification in the ~1980s! Discover, Allstate insurance, Dean Witter, Coldwell Banker for Sears (and Kmart had bought Borders, Builders Square, PACE, OfficeMax). If you trace the total return to a holder of Sears stock c. 1980, including the value they would have received in terms of stock in the spinoffs, the shareholders themselves may have actually ended up doing quite well in our timeline, even compared to one where Sears had reinvested all their profits into Sears, Roebuck & Co and maintained a more dominant retailing business as a result. It seems like no one really cared if the core business succeeded or failed, though.

Dunno how gamestop’s logistics works but they could leverage the existing shops as dropoff points for sellers and offer a pickup point option to bypass the postal system. eBay sellers are at a disadvantage vs Amazon warehouse sellers when it comes to shipping costs.

At least my shipping broker in Canada uses small retail stores as dropoff points and then has a network of gig courier delivery companies they send stuff to for last mile delivery. Saves a lot on shipping costs.

I’ve noticed they don’t really integrate with gig couriers for last mile US shipments, just a few consolidators for mid-mile (eg: UPS Mail Innovations that uses USPS for last mile)

Might further delay delivery times but I use eBay to save some dollars in exchange for delayed gratification.

I don’t know about everybody else but I both sell and buy on eBay items that are more niche but not totally bespoke like on Etsy (e.g. photography equipment or specific hats).

Which means an eBay store would never make sense for my type of buyer or seller because I would just go to one of the many other existing entrenched retailers for regular things.

I know eBay pushes hard for regular retail but ultimately I see it as a marketplace for less fungible items and that’s what it excels at. Regular retail for regular items is easier because the user experience is always standard.

GameStop is trying to sit in the middle and trying to move product that is a little more fungible (previously used games and now more trading cards and collectibles) but I just don’t know how big of a market it is when you have to factor brick and mortar upkeep. I don’t want them to take down eBay in an experiment.

>I am unsure how a Gamestop/eBay storefront would do. Physical manifestations of "eBay stores" have existed in the past and none of them did very well long term.

A key here I think is the easy gradual transition here because Gamestop already has the used games business they could slowly integrate that into listing used games on eBay that were received at stores and then add related categories step by step with collectables and consumer electronics. There'd also be options of ebay items delivered to store which increases store traffic and doesn't involve giving strangers on the internet your home address, and there might be opportunities there to enter logistics and lower delivery costs for people.

Everybody understands the proposal. They also understand that an offer of $20 billion loan + $7.5b cash in hand + stock in Gamestop valued by the market at $11b = $37.5b, which is < $55b, a discrepancy Cohen has not been able to account for. Ebay also understands that leveraged buy-outs are a death sentence, and that saddling its operations with $20b of debt in exchange for gaining a dead business like Gamestop would eventually kill it.

The $20B letter from TB is the leveraged part of the buy out and the math still doesn't add up even if you for some reason allow GME to dispose of all their cash in the deal without taking a hit to their stock price.

Ha yes of course, but th EU still have to show they can get the loan. They were unable to show that.

What U.S. tax code provision allows an individual to write off (non-primary-mortgage) loan interest?

They have to trot it out because otherwise there's not much else to pimp about Cohen as CEO and this attempted deal seems much more oriented to juice the total market value of GME to more easily meet the criteria for his recent pay package rather than a great idea for either company on it's own.

I'm not sure that the incentives actually are aligned. It seems like the incentives are to think short term and do sketchy shit to pump the stock.

While successfully running a business in a sustainable way may not be the peak of ambition, calling it low ambition is toxic in the other direction.

Doing a good job without it benefiting your personally.

"Running a business well" is now "low ambitions"?

unironically, yes. go get good at tetris if you need a high score for personal validation.

Book shops are actually one of the few physical stores I still want to visit

Gamestop sells a lot more collectables than just Funko Pops. I'm not a collector myself, but if I were I imagine I would prefer to see the thing in person to make sure of its condition before buying.

Well yeah, if that was your point, no one would need to be correcting you

Pot calling the kettle black. It'd be like Barney Gumble telling Boris Yeltsin what a great president he could be if he cut out the drinking.

Is this really a big problem for buyers now? Asking genuinely, not rhetorically. In my experience with eBay (my account is 25 years old), the one thing you could count on is that buyers who receive nothing, or get a box of bricks, or broken items or whatever, basically 100% of the time, will get refunded - if necessary, by eBay itself. (This has been frustrating of course for honest sellers who get scammed by buyers.)

So, if they have a ton of scammers now, I would think customers are not being that impacted, and I would have also thought that eBay wouldn’t have too hard a time getting the sellers to pay the refunds, since they tend to withhold the funds from sellers until a little while after the delivery is confirmed.

Show me any platform that successfully prevented scam.

>To them, I have a question like, are we watching the same interview? How can anyone watch that interview and then consider it in any way positively or anything like that, like huh, have we watched the same interview?

It all comes down to a belief in "trolling". Once you assume that your chosen individual might act stupid on purpose, you lose the ability to discern between actual stupidity and fake stupidity. GameStop enthusiasts see that interview and assume Cohen is mocking the interviewers as a show of intentional disrespect. They think he's not actually clueless, just trolling.

Unfortunately, this sort of belief is self-reinforcing. Once you get over the hurdle of believing in trolling the first time, the next instance seems completely plausible. Every time it happens, you become more convinced that the person engages in a pattern of trolling — after all, you've seen it so many times! You don't realize that the source of your belief is not accumulated independent evidence, but a chain that rests on a single link.

This is because the community around Gamestop is radicalized by the exact same grievance culture behind the MAGA movement. It even started conveniently in January of 2021, at a point of MAGA's seeming obsolescence. The adherents of this movement have already accepted the final result as guaranteed, and literally every piece of news the world over gets interpreted through the lens of this eventuality that Gamestock's stock price will explode, making them all millionaires and billionaires. Just like MAGA, the community is full of people whose main role is to delegitimize negative news, and reframe it all as instead proof that the mother of all short squeezes is imminent. Today is the perfect day to see this playing out on their subreddits.

If diluting your stock is a magical infinite money glitch, why doesn't Cohen just buy Nvidia? Heck, I think GOOG is now the most valuable, why not both? Throw TSLA in while you are at it and AMZN, I am sure there is some synergistic potential.

...ya'll are still doing this?

I know it doesn't. But I felt like parent commenter was offering to explain what CNBC and the rest of us didn't understand, that he does.

TLDR: half cash, half stock.

In my defense, I had entirely forgotten GME is/was a meme stock. It's been many years since I spent brain cycles thinking about WSB.

I agree, but he had to know he'd be asked the question, right? And he had to know that staring blankly and mumbling about the offer being on the website wouldn't suffice as an explanation. It's just mind-boggling behavior from the CEO of a public company.

For more information, see Dan Olsen's "This is Financial Advice." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pYeoZaoWrA Its a few years old, but gives you some perspective on the weird cult that has been built around GME.

Edit: Where Ryan Cohen comes in: https://youtu.be/5pYeoZaoWrA?t=6629