EBay Completes GSI E-Commerce Acquisition

As part of its quest for world domination in e-commerce, eBay (news, site) announced today that it has completed its acquisition of GSI Commerce Inc., a provider of e-commerce and interactive marketing services

Last Piece of the E-Commerce Puzzle

EBay has been acquiring a number of e-commerce companies lately in the process of building itself an e-commerce framework. GSI may be one of the final pieces, GigaOm pointed out as part of eBay's acquisition of Magento earlier this month, because it makes eBay more attractive to larger vendors. GSI provides e-commerce and marketing services to more than 2,000 brands such as Toys “R” Us, the National Football League and Polo Ralph Lauren.

The stockholders of GSI approved the adoption of the merger agreement with eBay at the special meeting of stockholders held on June 17th and the merger became effective later that day, eBay said.

EBay Sniped?

EBay said it had acquired all of the outstanding shares of GSI’s stock for US$ 29.25 per share in cash, or total consideration of approximately US$ 2.4 billion.

However, there's more to the story than that. A number of GSI shareholders had filed suit against eBay, claiming the amount bid was too low. The parties announced on June 10 that they had reached an agreement whereby eBay would pay an additional 33 cents per share to certain shareholders, which adds about $24 million to the cost of the acquisition, according to Bloomberg.

In addition, eBay also agreed to sell GSI's licensed sports merchandise business and a 70% stake in ShopRunner and Rue La La to NRG Commerce LLC, a newly formed holding company headed by GSI founder and CEO Michael Rubin, because they weren't part of its long-term strategy, Bloomberg said. Those businesses were also part of what led investors to file the lawsuit, because they felt those businesses weren't being adequately valued, according to the Philadelphia Business Journal.