eBay's ex-GSI Commerce split 4 ways
Will the pieces be worth more?
eBay Enterprise, the King of Prussia-based company that helped retailers combat Amazon.com with its contracted online sales, logistics and delivery services, has been split by its new private-equity owners (who agreed last summer to pay $925 million for the group, four years after eBay spent $2.5 billion for its predecessor, Michael Rubin's GSI Commerce), into these four businesses:
- eBay Enterprise/Innotrac, a "standalone omni-channel commerce operations company" owned by investors Sterling Partners and Longview Asset Management. The eBay Enterprise group will be combined with Georgia-based Innotrac Corp. to form a single company with 7,500 employees at 27 warehouses and 6 customer-service sites in North America and Europe, offering store shipments and order-management, payments, tax and fraud software solutions. The group will be "rebranded" after the Christmas shopping rush.
King of Prussia-based eBay Enterprise boss Tobias Hartmann, who joined in 2011 from Germany's G+S, will run the combined company. Innotrac founder Scott Dorfman will be a shareholder and a board member. Sterling principal Todd Miller promised "focused and superior solutions" for retailers.
- eBay Enterprise Marketing Solutions, run from King of Prussia and offices in Wilkes-Barre (in Pennsylvania's warehouse country) by past eBay executive Michael Jones, and owned by London-based Permira Funds (past investments include Informatica, Magneto, Genesys) and San Francisco-based Banneker Partners (a frequent Permira partner whose investments include Ancestry.com and RocketLawyer), promises to use retail data to help retailers "optimize marketing spend".
- Magento Commerce Technologies, an open-source "omnichannel innovation" developer in Campbell, Calif., run by former eBay exectuive Mark Lavelle, which promises to "disrupt the legacy technologies" that still dominate retail purchasing;
- An eBay Enterprises-derived customer relationship management (CRM) business has been sold to New York-based Zeta Interactive, "a data-driven marketing technology firm." More here