eBay announced last week that they’d rolled Magento into their eBay Enterprise division. eBay Enterprise did of course used to be called GSI Commerce.
Christopher Saridakis, president of eBay Enterprise: “This is a game-changer for us. We’re going on the offensive, taking the reins of innovation and further positioning eBay Enterprise as an industry leader.”
I’m not quite so excited about it though, I’m still trying to figure out what it means for Magento and how it’ll affect those with a Magento website.
I can see why it makes sense for eBay to have all their non-marketplace commerce operations in one division, but they’re yet to share their plans for Magento and reveal quite how it’ll fit within eBay Enterprise. eBay Enterprise owns and operates 3 million square feet of fulfillment space and four call centers in the US, one can only wonder if services such as fulfillment will be made available to the generally much smaller Magento users. It’s likely to be much more troublesome for eBay Enterprise to handle the lower volumes that smaller retailers have so this would be an interesting development.
Currently, bar the announcement, there’s nothing on the eBay Enterprise website about Magento, which still appears to operate autonomously. We’ll update you if we find out anything new.
One Response
I don’t think it will have much impact at all on small to medium sized Magento customers, Community and Magento Go. According to Roy Rubin (co-founder of Magento) this will be for Magento Enterprise customers only but declines to say how many Enterprise customers they have.
Although the integration has been in the works for the past year, only two merchants are using it so far.