EBay Buys Bill Me Later and DBA - Lays Off 1,000
EBay today announced that it will acquire U.S. based online payments business Bill Me Later and the Danish classifieds site dba.dk. For Bill Me Later, eBay paid approximately $820 million in cash and $125 in outstanding options, while it acquired the Danish sites for $390 in cash. At the same time, eBay also announced that it plans to reduce its workforce by 10 percent.
Bill Me Later, which is based in Maryland, launched in 2003 and Amazon, one of eBay biggest rivals, invested in it in 2007. While it doesn't have the name recognition of Paypal, Bill Me Later actually has a larger market share than PayPal and has a number of very large clients, including various airlines, Amazon, TigerDirect, and Apple. According to Gartner, Bill Me Later has seen triple-digit growth in the last few years.
Dba.dk is Denmark's largest online classifieds and auctions site and has been able to challenge eBay in its own market.
Fewer Auction - More Direct Transactions
EBay's move to acquire classifieds sites and payment services is part of the company's strategy of putting less emphasis on auctions and more on direct transactions. EBay is currently in a bit of a slump and its workforce reduction is clearly meant to keep cost under control while the company restructures its business.
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Bill Me Later is headquartered in Timonium, MD with additional offices in Hunt Valley, MD and San Francisco, CA. Bill Me Later is offered through CIT Bank, Salt Lake City, Utah.
Posted by: tomloveland.myopenid.com
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October 6, 2008 9:40 AM
This is an interesting development!! So eBay now has both online payment systems under the same umbrella. Wouldn't this trigger an anti-monopolistic investigation?
Looks like an opportunity for someone to set up a good customer friendly auction site, appealing to the clientele that helped build ebay.
It seems weird to want to drive ebay into being a commodity b2c e-commerce platform when there are so many out there, and they don't even offer a particularly good one (just a big marketplace).
I presume 10% less staff means even poorer support than they already offer too.
ha! i just hope all the billmelater developers get canned. a bunch of useless arrogant jerks.
What's interesting about Bill Me Later is that its origins go back to Nortel. You can read about it here: http://tinyurl.com/billmelater
Mark
"...while it acquired the Danish sites for $390 in cash."
Did I read right?
$390? :-o