eBay’s RedLaser Purchase: A Risky E-Commerce Move
Written by Evan SchumanJuly 1st, 2010
eBay's purchase last week of RedLaser, a small but extremely popular mobile app that scans barcodes and then displays how much various retailers are charging for the items, reflects a calculated risk for the auction giant.
That's mostly because the chief goal of many acquisitions is to deny the product/service/technology to key rivals. With RedLaser, though, eBay chose to go out of its way to make the app much more available to competitors and to do it for free. Making such a move at this stage of Mobile Commerce is a decision that could ultimately prove brilliant or insane.
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One Comment | Read eBay’s RedLaser Purchase: A Risky E-Commerce Move
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-Christine
July 12th, 2010 at 8:19 pm
What possible good is RedLaser to eBay? Due to eBay’s lack of control over prices on eBay and their constant fee increases, prices on eBay are unlikely to be that attractive to consumers. And, merchants surely aren’t going to direct buyers to eBay when they can direct them to their own sites, or elsewhere, and avoid eBay’s ever higher and higher profit-sucking fees.
Why then would anyone (even the idiots at eBay) want to promote a technology that is probably going to direct buyers away from their own principal site? Then, we have to assume that this most unscrupulous organization, eBay that is, won’t apply a “Best Match” algorithm to favor themselves, don’t we?
Sounds like another “Skype” purchase to me. Oh, sorry, I forgot, PayPal is going to be eBay’s major growth area in the future. Oh yeah, dream on …
Then, who knows, maybe eBay is going to use some of their overseas stash of cash to fill those rumoured eBay warehouses with Chinese manufactures and start selling their own inventory? If so, methinks the Chief Headless Turkey may have, once again, found another way to continue converting all those past-laid golden eggs to brass …
So what is going on? I think we are observing the most stupid, cruel and inhumane, slow slaughtering of probably the most successful commercial golden-egg laying goose of modern times. Clearly, headless turkeys harbor a great resentment towards such gifted geese …
Whatever is the grand plan that Donahoe has for eBay, clearly there is no place in it for all those sellers who made eBay the success that it used to be, nor for the buyers who wanted to buy what those sellers had to offer. Is that not a very strange strategy for “turning a business around”—and around, and around, and around …”?
Still, it will be interesting to hear how the Chief Headless Turkey spins the ongoing disastrous consequences of the April Fools Day IT Massacre, when he presents what will undoubtedly be another creative reporting on the 21st next.