We tried to sit down with Ryan Cohen, founder of Chewy, chairman of GameStop, and the man currently attempting to buy a company four times his size. to discuss ambition, audacity, and what exactly he said to his bankers. He said no, we were bonkers. This is what we think would have happened.

Let’s start at the beginning. You built Chewy from nothing into a $3.35 billion exit. That’s a legitimate origin story. Why isn’t that enough?

It’s never enough. I see undervalued things and I want to fix them. That’s just who I am.

Right. And GameStop,you saw something undervalued there too.

Absolutely. The market had written them off. I saw the community, the stores, the potential in collectibles and trading cards. We repositioned the business.

You did. And the stock went from about $4 to $500 in a matter of weeks in 2021. That must have been something.

It was extraordinary. The retail investor community believed in what we were building.

They did. And then it came back down to earth. Currently trading around $28. Are those retail investors,the ones who bought at $400,part of the community you’re still building for?

We’re focused on long-term value creation.

Of course. Let’s talk about eBay. You started accumulating a 5% stake in February,the same week eBay announced the Depop acquisition and posted its strongest quarterly numbers in years. Most people buy undervalued assets. You bought one mid-momentum. What did you see that the market didn’t?

The market is pricing eBay at its current trajectory. I’m pricing it at its ceiling. There’s a significant gap between those two numbers.

There is. And to close that gap, you’ve proposed $2 billion in annualised cost cuts within twelve months. $1.2 billion of that comes from sales and marketing. eBay spent $2.4 billion on S&M in 2025 and added one million net active buyers. You want to cut half of that budget. What happens to the buyers?

The marginal dollar of marketing spend at eBay is producing almost nothing. The model is inefficient.

The marginal dollar, yes. Rick Watson,one of the sharper analysts writing about this,makes exactly that point. But he also notes you’re making a much bigger claim about the average dollar. Cut half the budget and you don’t just lose the marginal spend. You potentially lose the brand. Anyone who ran a DTC P&L through 2023 watched that happen in real time. Why is eBay different?

eBay has 134 million active buyers. The brand doesn’t need $2.4 billion to hold that base.

It might not need it to hold the base. It definitely needs something to grow it. eBay just signed a headline sponsorship of Saturday Night Live UK specifically to introduce eBay Live to a new generation of buyers. That’s brand spend doing exactly what brand spend is supposed to do. You’d cut the budget that funds moves like that.

We’d be more targeted. More efficient.

More targeted than Saturday Night Live UK?

[pause]

We’d find the right vehicles.

Let’s talk about the vehicles. 1,600 GameStop stores as authentication centres, fulfilment hubs, live commerce studios. That’s the part of your proposal that survives the most scrutiny. It’s a genuinely interesting idea. But GameStop’s mainstay business buys goods wholesale and resells them through physical stores. eBay earns fees without touching inventory. These are not just different companies. They’re structurally opposite business models. How do you integrate them without breaking both?

The stores are the story. The physical network is something eBay could never build organically. We’re not merging the business models,we’re adding infrastructure.

You’re adding infrastructure that employs tens of thousands of people across a retail footprint that’s been contracting for years, onto a marketplace business that has succeeded precisely because it doesn’t carry the costs of physical retail. Morgan Stanley called the business models “fundamentally different.” Michael Burry,who once compared you to Warren Buffett,sold all his GameStop shares and called the strategy pedestrian. These are not obscure critics.

Michael is entitled to his view.

He is. He also said your honest intent is to dominate collectibles and used goods, not compete with Amazon,that the Amazon framing is cover for a narrower play. Is he wrong?

I think the opportunity is bigger than collectibles.

You said on CNBC that “we have the ability to issue stock to get the deal done.” That’s the financing answer you gave on national television for a $56 billion acquisition. eBay shareholders receiving GameStop stock as part of their consideration are being asked to swap equity in a cash-generative, debt-free marketplace for equity in a $12 billion retailer whose valuation is partly a function of the deal itself. Can you see why that’s a hard sell?

We have $9.4 billion in cash. We have a $20 billion highly confident letter from TD Securities. The financing works.

The financing works if the stock leg is accepted by institutional shareholders who own the majority of eBay’s float. Those shareholders watched eBay trade at $110 against your $125 offer,a fifteen dollar gap that represents the market giving your deal roughly a coin flip’s chance of closing. What do you say to the institutional eBay shareholder who has watched the stock rise 20% this year, seen Depop acquired, seen the SNL UK partnership, seen Q1 GMV up 18%, and is now being asked to take GameStop paper as part of the exit?

We’re offering a 46% premium to where eBay was trading in February.

A 46% premium to February’s price. A 20% premium to Friday’s close. And the premium is being paid partly in the currency of a company whose market cap depends significantly on retail investor sentiment and the success of this very deal. That’s not a criticism,it’s a structural observation. Has any institutional investor told you privately they’re comfortable with the stock leg?

We’re in active discussions.

You went on CNBC and the market went to $110. You needed it to go to $125. That’s the gap between a press tour and a deal.

We’re just getting started.

Let’s end where we began. You looked at eBay,a company with the right strategy, the right infrastructure, genuine momentum, a 30-year brand, 134 million buyers, $1.5 billion in free cash flow,and decided it needed you to rescue it. eBay’s position is that the turnaround is working and disruption is the wrong call. Make the case, in one sentence, for why you’re right and they’re wrong.

They’re executing at the speed of a company that doesn’t want to get fired. I’m offering the speed of a company that has nothing to lose.

That’s a very honest answer.

I know.

It’s also, for an eBay shareholder, the most frightening thing you’ve said today.

[smiles]

Ryan Cohen, thank you for your time.

The Ostrich Report covers ecommerce strategy, platform dynamics, and the business of retail for senior operators and industry insiders. Sometimes we interview people who haven’t technically agreed to be interviewed.

Ryan Cohen declined to comment. The quotes above represent what he would have said if he had.

The conversation we recorded for the season opener of The Ostrich Report wasn’t a forecast. It was a post-mortem with the corpse still warm. Malte had called the biggest marketplace stories of the last five months already, in a quiet chat we’d had some time back. Hendrik and I sat there and basically held a light while he described how we got here.

Let me walk you through the receipts.

The Amazon Door Charge

Malte’s framing for last year’s robots.txt crackdown was elegant and a little brutal: Amazon didn’t panic-close the doors on Perplexity and every other agentic bot because it was scared. It closed them because it needed time to build doorways you’d have to pay to walk through.

Six months later, here we are. The $1,400 annual Selling Partner API subscription kicked off on January 31. The monthly per-call usage fees start this month, April 30, roughly one week from now. Every Perplexity bot, every Copilot assistant, every ChatGPT Go shopping agent that wants to window-shop inside the Everything Store is about to become a line item. Amazon has also, for good measure, filed a computer-fraud complaint against Perplexity.

That isn’t Amazon defending itself. That’s Amazon monetising a new traffic category before the category has a Gartner quadrant. The quote that stuck: “Amazon was simply buying time.” Time, it turns out, is expensive.

The PayPal Move Malte Saw Coming

When Malte and I first kicked this around months ago, he told me the companies who win this cycle are the ones making merchant catalogues fluent in the language of agentic surfaces. Not storefronts. Not marketing. Catalogue hygiene, product data, inventory sync, boring plumbing.

PayPal announced on January 22 that it was buying Cymbio for an estimated nine figures. The pitch on the tin: sync product data, inventory, and orders across Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity, with OpenAI and Gemini next. “Merchant-of-record intact,” the press release insists. That’s Malte’s thesis with a logo and a term sheet.

As we covered in the de minimis and TikTok long-game pieces earlier this year, the pattern now is consistent: the money moves toward whoever controls the layer just underneath the consumer interface. In 2018 it was the checkout. In 2022 it was the ad network. In 2026 it’s whoever can make your product legible to a bot in a way the bot trusts enough to surface it.

The John Lewis Footnote

We spent a few minutes on John Lewis too, and here the critical reader earns their keep, because that one was already public when we hit record. On March 9, John Lewis announced a TikTok Shop launch and agentic commerce integration via commercetools, with ChatGPT and Gemini named explicitly as discovery surfaces. £800m transformation budget behind it.

If you’re Irish or European watching this from across the water, don’t read that as John Lewis finally catching up. Read it as John Lewis quietly re-architecting the shop window before anyone else on the UK high street notices the glass has moved. That’s the Kevin Kelly point about technological shifts that were never really invented — they were latent, waiting for the right trading conditions. Agentic retail didn’t arrive last month. The plumbing for it was already live. John Lewis just agreed to connect.

The Continental Divide

Hendrik pulled the camera back to the global map, and this is where he earned his seat. His take: this cycle has Cold War geography. China’s adoption of AI commerce is already common sense, Alibaba’s Qwen app hit ten million downloads in a week, silently. The US makes enough noise for three continents. Europe is sitting in regulatory dread. Africa and Latin America come last, as they always do, and most likely via government-run rails rather than platform rails.

Ireland sits in both worlds, as usual. Most of the big US platforms host their EU headquarters a cab ride from my office. Every one of them is writing an answer to the DSA at the same time they’re writing an answer to Rufus. The merchant on the ground is the one carrying both bills.

Hendrik’s line of the episode, which I think I’ll be stealing for the next six months: “Kiss the ring. The ring’s name is Rufus.”

The Turn

Here’s the complication, and it’s worth sitting with. Malte’s predictions held. That doesn’t mean his prescriptions will.

The scariest thing about Amazon’s playbook right now isn’t the paywall on the API. It’s that the paywall feels reasonable. The scariest thing about the PayPal/Cymbio deal isn’t what PayPal bought, it’s that merchants now have three or four more doors they have to pay to appear behind. Malte also dropped a stat worth your attention: in some categories, baby, pantry staples, beverage, non-branded search has already crossed 90%. Every brand manager you know will tell you those are the categories where trust matters most. The review layer already ate the brand layer. The brand team was at an offsite and missed the memo.

The Landing

At the end of the recording I pitched Malte and Hendrik an idea I want to build into this season: a Cluetrain Manifesto for agentic commerce. The original Cluetrain Manifesto tried to write down what the internet was actually for, before it calcified into banner ads and cookie consent pop-ups. Agentic commerce is at the same inflection point now. Someone should write down what it’s actually meant to do, before the toll booths become the only thing it’s ever really been.

That’s what this season is for.

A sponsor joins us from next week, more on that shortly. If you’re moving the needle on marketplaces, agentic AI, cross-border trade, logistics, or any of the messy stuff in between and you’d like to guest or back the show, come talk. We’re building The Ostrich Report toward the number one seat for marketplace news globally this year, and we’ve got fifteen episodes and an Atlantic to cross.

Hendrik, thanks for the company. Malte, thanks for the receipts.

See you next Thursday.

And eBay why this? Why now? Myself Hendrik Laubscher were joined on a post Valentines Day nostalgic walk down Saly lake City Drive reminiscing of better days. Is history repeating itself? We have been critical of eBay over the years and it is a lack of identity we talk about, not performancel Indeed, under Jamie Iannone they are on a nice trajectory and Q4 did Q4 things for them. But growth is hard to come by, so bully for them.

Is this purchase a defensive move against Vinted or is this just a tiredd acquisition strategy. We got in on Whatnot and getting back to core among many other things. Watch this full episode of the Ostrich Report to see where we land see if you agree.

eBay internally said they wanted to crush amazon, externally they said they do not want to be Amazon. mission accomplished for the wrong reasons. But do ebay get a bad rap? Are they exactly what David Marcus talked about last week in his PayPal address? Should we celebrate middle of the road or are they quietly ambitious - PLacing bets every few years not afraid to offload when the pressure is high (unliek Drake Maye, maybe he is just too young).

Ostrich Report doing Ostrich report things - Sorry, Ben is hidden by the banner in the final version !! NNNooooooo

Jamie runs the marketplace business at Dr. Squatch, with a heavy focus on Amazon plus retail.com 1P. She’s not a “thought leader,” she’s the person who has to make the numbers work every 90 days.

A few threads we pulled on:

Marketplace Inception = a P&L inside a P&L.

Jamie’s team owns the whole thing end to end:

What to sell

How to get it into Amazon

How to price, bundle & merchandise it

How to put media behind it without destroying the margin.

If you’re promising +25% YoY on Amazon, you better understand what that actually entails operationally.

📦 1P vs 3P the knife fight.

We unpacked:

Why running 3P means owning the inventory.

How bundles become your secret weapon.

The real trade-off.

Cannibalization is out, incrementality is in

Two years ago, everyone was panicking:

“Is Amazon cannibalizing my DTC?”

Today Jamie’s more focused on:

“How do I prove incrementality of media and new product launches across channels?”

Jamie is magical. A caring, natural leader who listens and learns. A clasic practitioner who trusts her team. This enables success. Admittedly, she is a nerd for this stuff, but maybe you gotta be.

Jamie spends 20–30% of her time inside the numbers. First tab open: yesterday’s sales in Seller Central. Then deeper analytics Squatch has built in-house.

The bit most brands won’t say out loud:

Every channel has horrible blind spots.

Amazon just happens to give you enough data to keep you hooked and “just informed enough” to keep spending.

You win on Amazon by owning intent.

We debate whether AI agents will:

Supercharge big CPGs with deep pockets.

Or reward the brands who are faster at updating content, testing, and staying “recent” in LLMs.

Jamie’s view: we’re still early, there’s a lot of buzzword bingo, and the real work is still growth & media strategy, not AI theatre.

Culture > strategy (especially in marketplaces)

We also get into how she:

Runs a distributed, multi-time-zone team.

Keeps marketplace from being a weird silo off to the side.

This is a whopper episode.

Shares data & reporting so the rest of the business actually uses marketplace insights instead of treating Amazon like a dark art.

Oh, and yes, we did manage to talk about Star Wars soap, Chewbacca as a scent choice, and why marketplaces should still be fun.

…this episode will either make you feel seen or mildly attacked. Maybe both. Presented with our good friends from EVOLVE Commerce Club our communuty partner.

Episode here:

There are cultural moments. And then once a year China lights the ecommerce beacons, JD.com flexes its fulfilment biceps, and the rest of us sit there whispering:

“How… in the actual…?”

Welcome to our latest episode of The Ostrich Report, where Hendrik Laubscher and I dove beak-first into Singles Day 2025 the shopping festival that casually moved $238.3 billion in the time it takes most Western brands to agree on “final-final-final creative.”

And this year?

It wasn’t just big.

It was absurd.

The Headline Numbers (aka: “Your CFO Just Fainted”),.695 trillion yuan in GMV roughly the GDP of Greece, Portugal, AND the HSE’s full budget for the next 7.8 years… combined.

Growth? +14.2% YoY. Slower, yes but scale so large the Richter scale needs a side extension.

Instant retail (1-hour delivery) up 138.4%, because apparently patience is dead.

JD.com:

+40% shoppers

+60% orders & a cross-border expansion so broad it should probably get its own airline.

80 brands smashed 100M yuan in the first hour. Apple did it in, checks notes, minutes. And because we love perspective around here…

One Singles Day = 57% of Apple’s annual global revenue

One Singles Day = 37% of Amazon’s annual earnings

One Singles Day = all of NASA… for nine years

One Singles Day = New York City… for two years

One Singles Day = Ireland’s entire health system… nine times over

(Yes. Nine.)

If your eyes are watering, that’s normal. Mine did too.

Trends That Would Have Looked Unrealistic in a 2011 PowerPoint.

AI everything: tablets up 200%, smart glasses tripled, and consumers apparently fine with having their homes talk back to them.

Beauty brands went nuclear: 79 brands crossed 100M yuan BEFORE some of us finished our morning coffee.

The Chinese consumer is now the world’s most disciplined bargain-hunter with a black belt in “value.”

The campaign lasted 33 days we’re basically at “Singles Quarter” now.

Western Brands: The Overachievers’ Club

Apple cleared last year’s full-day total in two hours.

Nike likely crossed $1B in Singles Day sales again.

L’Oréal, Estée Lauder, Lancôme all hit 100M yuan in under 10 minutes.

Xiaomi casually reported $4.1B on its own.

Somewhere, a performance-marketing team whispered, “Are you not entertained?”

🎙️ So Why Are We Talking About This on The Ostrich Report?

Because Singles Day is, well, It’s big.

It’s fun.

It’s unhinged in places.

And it’s a reminder that the world’s largest ecommerce event still makes Black Friday look like a quiet Tuesday at Woodie’s.

🧵 Full Episode Drops Now

If you like marketplaces, cross-border chaos, nerdy context, or two grown men laughing at trillion-yuan events, this one’s for you.

🎧 All other epsiodes are here:

🎙️💵Amazon: https://bit.ly/3LAKds4

🎙️🍏Apple: https://apple.co/47zGjIu

🎙️🎚️Spotify: https://bit.ly/47TmAlV

🎙️📺Youtube: https://bit.ly/4nWYSLz

📈 24.7 million EU customers between April and August 2024.

🚀 By June 2025, that figure will hit 150 million active users.

💶 $1.2 billion in revenue from Europe alone.

💰 $120 million in profit, yes, profit, not “adjusted EBITDA.”

And they did it all by flipping the script: cross-border → credibility → local integration.

They’ve gone from “that Chinese discount app” to the default shopping channel in countries like Italy and Portugal, where 92% of consumers say buying direct from manufacturers saves them money without sacrificing quality.

Let’s be honest: Europe didn’t invite Temu in, Amazon’s complacency and eBay’s nostalgia did.

While old giants debated logistics and ad margins, Temu quietly built trust through delivery, gamification, and pricing transparency. You can now buy garden furniture in Ireland and get it in four days. eBay still can’t do that.

And that’s the part that should make every retailer nervous. Because 63% of shoppers already prefer marketplaces over brand sites, and 56% of those are impulse purchases. If you’re not there when the urge strikes, someone else is.

Meanwhile, brands selling on 3+ marketplaces grow 4.5x faster than those that don’t. My feedonomics report last year.

That’s new money. This is Arbitrage.

But here’s an uncomfortable question:

What happens when the most efficient marketplace on earth is also the least politically palatable?

Geopolitics will decide as much as strategy here. In the Nordics, 3 in 4 consumers say Temu increases price transparency. In the US, regulators call it a data Trojan horse. Both can be true.

So what do we do, block it, beat it, or learn from it?

Because whether you love or loathe Temu, you can’t deny one thing:

It’s teaching the West a painful lesson, speed, simplicity, and scale still win.

And if Europe is the battleground for trust and convenience, Temu just showed up with the biggest army we’ve ever seen.

🎙 Full episode now live: “Orange Is the New Commerce”, Hendrik and I unpack how Temu pulled off the fastest retail land grab since Amazon Prime.

💬 Question for you:

If Temu can win consumer trust this quickly, what excuse do Western marketplaces have left?

Proudly supported by our community partner EVOLVE Commerce Club

Subscribe now

🔮 Next Up

In our next episode, we dive into Temu’s explosive European growth the platform every EU regulator loves to hate. Expect strong opinions, questionable metaphors, and maybe a group therapy session for legacy retailers.

💸 Oh, and Sponsors…

We’re still looking for them.

If you’re a brave brand that wants your logo sitting next to this chaos, reach out. It’s cheaper than Google Ads and way more fun.

Episode 10 is here:

https://lnkd.in/ecNVXa4T

It’s a discipline.A way of thinking.A toolkit for solving problems across any industry.

Once you’ve learned to build and manage marketplaces, you start to see systems everywhere.The restaurant kitchen is just a fulfillment center with higher stakes. A hotel lobby is a loyalty program waiting to be optimized. Even real estate starts to look like product listings, search filters, and conversion funnels.

That’s Rafael’s gift: taking the mindset forged in Brazil’s early eCommerce boom and applying it everywhere from Switzerland’s hospitality industry to AI-driven transformation projects today.

Some moments that hit hardest:

👉 “If you can build a marketplace, you can probably build any eCommerce business.” 👉 Marketplaces aren’t one-dimensional. You’re serving multiple “customers”: buyers, sellers, developers, and ecosystems. Balance or bust. 👉 AI isn’t just a buzzword, right now it’s about productivity. Next wave? Personalization. Think of it as the industrial revolution for intellectual work. 👉 Hospitality taught him that speed changes everything. Deliver food in 15 minutes or fail. That kind of timing discipline should terrify every retail exec. 👉 Coming from Latin America gave him adaptability muscles most of Europe doesn’t even know it needs.

This is why I love conversations like this,  they remind us that commerce is not a department, it’s a lens. Whether you’re selling sneakers, steaks, or square meters, the same underlying logic applies: systems, people, and the flow of value.

And that’s exactly what The Ostrich Report is here to explore. Honest, global stories that cut through the noise and show how commerce is really evolving.

🎧 Episode 1 is live now: Rafael Barini on marketplaces, AI, and the cultural power of adaptability. [Insert Spotify/Apple link here]

A big thanks to our community partner Evolve Commerce Club (where Rafael is also a proud member) for being part of this journey with us. And yes,  we are still looking for a headline sponsor to grow this show. If you believe in honest conversations about the future of global commerce, my inbox is open.

Big thanks again to Rafael for setting the tone for our very first guest episode, and Hendrik, you’d better bring the heat when you’re back on!

#ecommerce #marketplaces #AI #TheOstrichReport

Learn How How a former Wetherspoons kitchen worker built a freeze-dried sweet brand that sold 40,000 products on Temu in just two months — without spending a penny on ads.

This week on The Ostrich Report we sat down with Rhys Sandford of Exploded Sweets and, honestly, it was a masterclass in modern marketplace selling.

Rhys told us:

“No one ever buys something the first time they see it. You’ve got to constantly have these implants into people’s brains… where we currently use at Exploded Sweets, this cross-platform approach of being in people’s faces. People’s attention spans at the minute – they’ll scroll through 100 TikTok videos within ten minutes… having that cross-platform advertisement helps build those imprints into people quite early on.”

💥 Key numbers that stopped us in our tracks:
– 40,000 units sold on Temu within the first 2 months.
– 500 units sold in the first 3 days of launch.
– One customer placed 48 separate orders in 6 months.
– New product ideas turned around in days, not months.
– Feedback loops as fast as 3–5 days from purchase to implementation.

💡 What we learned from Rhys:
– Marketplaces aren’t just sales channels; they’re real-time R&D labs.
– Cross-platform discoverability isn’t copy/paste — you need unique twists for each platform.
– A culture of listening + iteration beats a big ad budget.
– Early adoption is a test lab, not a gamble. Rhys used Temu to refine products and discover new demographics (older generations as well as parents/kids).
– Speed is the new moat: feedback Monday, change Thursday, higher-quality product by Friday.

🍭 Why this matters:
Most CPG brands are still fighting algorithms, paying to get seen, and waiting weeks for insights. Rhys built a feedback loop so tight it turns sweets into data points and customers into collaborators.

Hendrik called it “utopia” during the recording. I called it a “unicorn” moment. If you sell on marketplaces (or want to), this is your wake-up call.

🎧 Listen to the full episode of The Ostrich Report here: [insert link]
Tagging my co-hosts [@HendrikLaubscher] and [@VinnyOBrien] and giving a nod to our community partners at Evolve Commerce Club for helping us surface stories like this.

For prospective sellers, visit Temu's seller portal at https://seller.temu.com/

Temu (yes, “Team-oo”) isn’t a sideshow anymore. It’s a $B+ engine of cross-border commerce, a logistics experiment running at TikTok speed, and a masterclass in how to make Western consumers rethink price, trust, and delivery promises. Everyone you meet in ecommerce has an opinion — good, bad, indifferent. This week we rewind to fast-forward: we set the scene, we break down the real story of Temu, and we ask whether its model is a warning sign, a blueprint…or both.

“You can tell by the way I wear my shirt, I’m a Temu guy.”
It started as a joke on the show. But it’s also a signal. Marketplaces like Temu are no longer fringe – they’re mainstream, and they’re already reshaping the playbooks brands, agencies and SIs thought were safe.

We dig into:
– How Temu is rewriting the rules of value and velocity.
– Why its model creates both irresistible reach and uncomfortable risk.
– What Western brands can (and can’t) copy.
– The bigger question: is “cheap” a moat or a time bomb?

This isn’t your typical “hot-take” podcast. We’re building a real community around unfiltered marketplace talk. Evolve Commerce Club are our community partner on The Ostrich Report — bringing founders, brand operators, agency leads, and curious industry nerds together around each episode.

And yes — we’re looking for a sponsor. If your company wants to sit at the intersection of global marketplaces, brand strategy and unvarnished conversation, our DMs are open. This is where ecommerce people actually talk like ecommerce people.

Over the next few weeks, we’re bringing some truly global, wildly talented guests to the show — operators and thinkers who’ve built, scaled and sometimes burned down the very models everyone else is still copying. It’s going to be unmissable.

🎙️ Episode 7 — “Temu, Kermit & the Future of Value” — is live now. Watch, listen, share, argue, tag the friend who swears Temu is a fad, and then tell us what you think.

In this episode, we unpack:

• The magic of eBay’s early years — when auctions, Beanie Babies, and broken laser pointers defined the internet.

• The one big thing eBay missed (hint: logistics + payments = Amazon’s crown, not eBay’s).

• The cultural highs and management lows — from PayPal to Skype to “why does eBay still feel like a flea market?”

• What founders and brands today can still learn from eBay’s wins and its missteps.

As Hendrik put it back then: “To understand eBay you have to understand ecommerce.” Thirty years later, that lesson still stands — even if eBay isn’t the one teaching it anymore.

This week we put the Ostrich in Ostrich Report by burying our heads deep into one of the most head-scratching deals of the year: JD.com spending €2.5B to buy Ceconomy, the German parent company of MediaMarkt and Saturn.

Yes, JD — the Chinese giant that was born an online retailer, flirted with marketplace models, wandered into logistics, cloud, and other shiny objects — is now buying two of Germany’s most traditional electronics retailers.

If you think this sounds like Amazon buying RadioShack in 2025, you’re not alone.

💡 Why this matters

• Amazon Germany is the marketplace gorilla, owning the customer relationship and the search bar. JD isn’t walking into an open field — they’re walking into an Amazon-owned parking lot.

• Germany’s retail culture is famously conservative. Family-owned businesses, slow digital adoption, and an in-person-first mentality. Perfect conditions for a Chinese e-commerce titan… said no one, ever.

• MediaMarkt & Saturn are legacy names with massive store networks. Great for physical reach, but also great for draining cash if the pivot to omnichannel fails.

🎯 Key questions we ask in this episode:

1. Is JD buying growth or buying a headache?

2. Will they try to “China-fy” the German market or adapt to it?

3. Is this a play to hedge against Temu and Shein eating their lunch at home?

4. If this fails — and JD does not have a glowing history of European success — what’s Plan B?

5. Is this a long-term strategic anchor or just an expensive LinkedIn announcement?

🔥 Hendrik’s take: This could be the M&A of the year in Europe — if it works. But history says Chinese e-commerce players have a tough time in European retail. Logistics strength means nothing if the consumer doesn’t want your basket.

🔥 Vinny’s take: The boldness is admirable, but so is jumping into the Atlantic in January — doesn’t mean it’s sensible.

If you’re into deals where corporate strategy meets cultural friction, and you want your retail M&A with a side of sarcasm, Episode 6 delivers.

🎧 Listen here before JD releases a “synergy roadmap” PDF full of clip-art and German buzzwords.

#Ecommerce #Retail #Marketplaces #MergersAndAcquisitions #TheOstrichReport

🎙️The Ostrich Report Ep 5 just dropped, and if nostalgia had a stock price, we'd all be rich… until activist investors spun it off for parts. Say his name Hendrik Laubscher - Humperdink (IYKYK)

Three big takeaways from our gloriously unhinged post-mortem on eBay's ‘meh decade’:

🔥 1. eBay didn’t lose its edge. It sold it.

“If eBay executed and innovated, we wouldn’t have seen The RealReal, StockX… or even Zillow.”

They were first to everything. Trust, buyer protection, vertical communities, Skype integration before Zoom was even born. But somewhere between 2005 and Carl Icahn’s morning espresso, they swapped imagination for margins. There, I said it.

💸 2. Innovation died in San Jose. It’s been replaced with Excel.

“We’re doing nothing and we’re happy about doing nothing.”

From spinning out PayPal under pressure to flopping the Skype play twice, eBay mistook "innovation" for "cash-out." Spoiler: The CEO who green-lit PayPal’s spin-off became Chairman of PayPal. Misalignment? Or just Silicon Valley's version of dating your ex’s richer sibling? In many reality shows, this seems to be normalized.

🪦 3. AI isn’t the future at eBay. Apparently, advertising is.

“We are in mid-2025, and I’ve yet to see any mention of how eBay plans to use AI. But ad spend? That’s the hill they’re dying on.”

While competitors like Amazon and Walmart build fortress-like AI ecosystems, eBay hands over its crown jewels (read: data) to third parties like Perplexity, hoping nobody notices the silence.

We asked: Can eBay come back?

And we answered: Sure, if Yahoo did.

This isn’t just a requiem for eBay, it’s a warning for any company that confuses shareholder value with customer value, or that thinks maintaining the status quo is a strategy.

You can be the tortoise in a race… but not if you keep selling your shell for parts.

🚨 The Ostrich Report: Episode 3 is out now! 🚨
🎙️ Starring: Two ecommerce nerds with more opinions than hair—Me and Hendrik Laubscher.

This week we tackle checks notes … whatever we felt like talking about for 25 minutes before running out of coffee and credibility.

✨ What’s inside? ✨

• Lukewarm takes on TikTok Shop

• Audible sighs about Amazon

• Some borderline slander (lawyers, let’s chat)

• And a moment of silence for our career prospects

📉 We are now 3 episodes deep and dangerously close to becoming LinkedIn’s version of Wayne’s World—but with worse lighting and more ecommerce charts.

But wait… Episode 4 is our love letter to eBay.
Our first ecommerce crush. The original garage sale of the internet. The reason we still sort our socks by “Buy It Now.”
💔 She ghosted us for years… but we’re ready to talk.

🧾 We’re also now actively (and shamelessly) looking for sponsors.
Do you sell a B2B SaaS product that automates literally anything?
Do you have a newsletter with fewer subscribers than us?
Do you own a fax machine and want to see it on camera?
We’ll partner with you. Just DM us before our parents make us get real jobs.

👇 Watch Episode 3 below and subscribe before we get shadowbanned by Shopify:

#TheOstrichReport #ecommerce #marketplaces #eBay #sponsorusplz #B2Bdesperation

• Why marketplaces are multiplying faster than AI bros on LinkedIn

• The real reason brands cry in the shower after selling on Amazon

• What the hell is going on in cross-border trade (and who’s profiting from the chaos)

• And how Shopify*, *Shein*, and *Temu might secretly be roommates in a very weird sitcom

Expect sarcasm. Expect strong opinions. Expect at least one tech reference no one fully understands. And if you're in the ecommerce game and NOT watching this? You're basically doing business blindfolded in a minefield.🎬 Watch, comment, like, and subscribe – or don’t. We’re not your mum.#TheOstrichReport #EcommerceUnfiltered #MarketplaceMayhem #GlobalTradeTea #PilotEpisode #SarcasmIncluded