Fergie's Tech Blog

eBay buys Shopping.com for $620 million

Via InfoWorld.

eBay continued its acquisition spree by agreeing to buy comparison shopping site Shopping.com for about $620 million in cash. The move should benefit eBay's sellers by giving them access to a new sales channel and a new set of buyers, while Shopping.com will be improved by the addition of eBay's listings on its site. eBay had annual revenue of $3.3 billion in 2004, and net income of $778.2 million. In the same year Shopping.com made $99 million in revenue and net income of $12.2 million. But Shopping.com has been adding customers at a faster clip, according to research company comScore Media Metrix. It attracted 22.6 million unique visitors in April, up 15 percent from the same month a year earlier, compared with 63.8 million for eBay, an increase of 6 percent over the same period. In December eBay agreed to buy property listings site Rent.com for $415 million, and a month before that it bought Holland's top classifieds site, Marktplaats.nl, for $290 million. Earlier last year it acquired a 25-percent stake in Craigslist of San Francisco, beefing up its classifieds business.

posted by Fergie @ 6/02/2005 06:04:00 AM