Online auction and shopping giant eBay has spent more than 200 million dollars in the last year making acquisitions of three businesses. This may not sound like much, but when you put it all on paper and look at the big picture; then you start to see it. EBay has been building itself to be right in the center of mobile and local commerce, and payments.
Besides owning PayPal, eBay now owns three other companies. The first was purchased in June of last year; a barcode-scanning application called RedLaser. RedLaser is a mobile app designed specifically for mobile device cameras. It lets customers scan a product barcode while out shopping, to get information and comparison prices.
Then, in December last year, eBay bought Milo. Milo tracks real-time availability and price of millions of products at over 48 thousand stores across the United States, which can be purchased online, but come from local merchants. It helps retailers to compete better, by having an e-commerce presence, and bring foot traffic to their brick-and-mortar business.
Now, this last month eBay just purchased “WHERE”. ‘WHERE’; is a top-ranked mobile application, on all mobile platforms. The consumer app helps users to find, and share, great local deals and pertinent information. The WHERE app delivers more than 1 billion hyper-local ads to more than 100 publishers.
With the purchase of these companies, eBay is sitting really good to make a strong emergence in the mobile commerce and payments arena. Remember, eBay owns PayPal too. PayPal makes up around 39 percent of eBay’s total revenue.
As the new era of online commerce blends with offline and local commerce, eBay should be set up well enough to thrive greatly, in any (if not all) of these areas.
