GameStop wants to buy eBay, and eBay wants nothing to do with it. On May 3, GameStop put a $56 billion unsolicited offer on the table for the marketplace where millions of sellers list their products, valuing eBay at $125 a share. Nine days later eBay’s board threw it out, calling the bid “neither credible nor attractive.” Then GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen went on camera and said he would do “whatever we need to do” to get the deal done. So now the channel a lot of you sell on is in play, and the man trying to take it over once ran an activist campaign that ended with a retailer in bankruptcy.
I want to walk through what actually happened, what Cohen can and cannot do next, and the part most sellers skip: what an ownership fight over a marketplace means for the people who depend on that marketplace to pay their bills. I cover this kind of thing every day over at Ecommerce Paradise, and this one matters more than the stock-ticker drama suggests. If a chunk of your revenue runs through eBay, Amazon, or any platform you do not own, this is your wake-up call.
Most of the coverage is treating this as a Wall Street story. It is also an operator story, and the lesson sitting underneath it is one I have been hammering for fifteen years.
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What Happened
As Al Jazeera reported, GameStop submitted a non-binding proposal on May 3 to acquire 100% of eBay at $125.00 per share in a mix of cash and stock. That worked out to roughly $55.5 billion in equity value and represented a 46% premium to eBay’s closing price on February 4, the day GameStop quietly started building its position. Half the offer was cash, drawn from GameStop’s $9.4 billion in reserves, and half was stock.
The financing is where analysts started raising eyebrows. GameStop has a non-binding commitment letter from TD Securities for up to $20 billion in debt, but only if the combined company can land investment-grade credit ratings. Industry analysts have openly questioned whether that is possible for a videogame retailer trying to swallow a company nearly five times its size. As CNBC reported, Cohen also floated issuing GameStop stock to help fund the purchase, which tells you how much of this rides on shares rather than cash in hand.
On May 12, eBay’s board rejected the proposal. Per Bloomberg, directors pointed to uncertainty around the financing, the operational risk of the combination, and GameStop’s own governance track record. The word “credible” did a lot of work in that rejection, and it was not a compliment.
Here is the detail that undercuts the whole threat. GameStop says it has 6.6% in “economic exposure” to eBay, up from about 5%, but most of that is not real ownership. It comes from put and call derivative positions tied to 29 million shares that only carry voting rights if the contracts are physically settled. GameStop owns just 25,000 eBay shares outright, which is roughly 0.006% of the company, a gap laid out in eBay’s SEC filing. The voting power behind the bid is, for now, almost entirely on paper.
How We Got Here
Cohen is not a random raider. He co-founded Chewy, sold it to PetSmart, and then became the face of the 2021 GameStop saga when he took a board seat and helped pull the company back from the edge as hedge funds bet it into the ground. Retail investors treated him like a folk hero. He became chairman in June 2021 and CEO in 2023.
The record since then is mixed. GameStop now carries an $11 billion market value after Cohen cut costs and pivoted the company away from video games and toward trading cards, funded by big stock sales that his retail base happily bought. But the share price is down about 70% since he took over as chairman, once you account for splits. His 2022 activist campaign at Bed Bath & Beyond is the part eBay’s board clearly remembers: he built a stake, made noise, sold his shares for a reported $60 million profit, and the retailer collapsed into bankruptcy in 2023.
eBay, meanwhile, has been quietly excellent. Shares are up 32% so far this year, giving it a market value around $51 billion, and it posted strong first-quarter earnings driven by high-growth categories like collectibles, trading cards, and memorabilia. Under CEO Jamie Iannone, who took over in 2020, the stock has climbed roughly 200%. The company turned an operating margin of 31% last fiscal year, three times GameStop’s 10%. This is not a broken business begging to be rescued. That gap is exactly why the board felt comfortable saying no.
What Cohen Can Actually Do Next
A rejection is not the end of a hostile bid, and bankers have already mapped out Cohen’s options. The first is a tender offer, where he bypasses the board entirely and offers to buy shares directly from eBay’s investors at a premium. The precedent everyone cites is Paramount Skydance, which used an all-cash tender offer to grind Warner Bros Discovery into negotiations despite an existing Netflix agreement, and won after being rejected at least half a dozen times.
The math is brutal for Cohen here. eBay’s three largest holders are Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street, the index-fund giants, and together they own more than 22% of the company. They hold eBay automatically because it sits in the indexes they track, and they are not in the habit of hand-delivering control to a hostile bidder. Don Bilson, head of event-driven research at Gordon Haskett, put it bluntly: “There is zero chance that a tender offer works. No eBay shareholder would opt into this.”
The second option is calling a special meeting to install friendlier directors. That requires Cohen to own a meaningful chunk of common stock, traditionally around 20%, and he is nowhere close. Even if every derivative converted into voting shares, GameStop would still fall far short. This is likely why GameStop asked its own investors on Friday to authorize lifting its share count from 1 billion to 2.5 billion. The company framed it carefully, saying it views its equity as “precious” and would not issue shares “lightly,” but the timing fueled speculation that Cohen wants more stock available to buy his way into a bigger eBay position.
The third option is the one he is already running: public pressure. Cohen told investor Anthony Pompliano that eBay “needs to be on Ozempic, it’s literally obese,” and told Piers Morgan the company is “run by a bunch of losers.” Analysts pushed back, noting eBay’s 31% margin makes it one of the leaner operators in retail. Mark Cohen, the former Sears Canada CEO and no relation, summed up the skeptic case: Ryan Cohen has “enough money to make the claim but not enough money to make his claim stick.” And because an unwelcome bid runs on no clock, Bilson noted one more path. Cohen can “just sit there and wait. There is no rush.”
Why This Matters for Your Store
Strip away the personalities and here is what you are looking at. The marketplace a lot of sellers built their income on just became a chess piece. Whether or not this deal ever closes, eBay’s leadership is now spending energy fighting off a raider instead of improving seller tools, and the people listing products on the platform had zero say in any of it. That is the structural problem with renting your storefront. You are a tenant in a building that can be bought, sold, or fought over while you sleep.
Think through the scenarios. If Cohen somehow wins, the man who pivoted GameStop on a dime and sold Bed Bath & Beyond shares into a collapse is suddenly setting your fee structure and your seller protections. If he loses but keeps the pressure on, eBay’s management gets defensive and short-term, which usually means squeezing the take rate to juice the numbers that keep activists quiet. Neither outcome is built around you. I have watched sellers lose 30% of their revenue overnight when a platform changed a single policy, and those sellers had no recourse because they never owned the relationship with the customer.
This is the same lesson behind every marketplace story I have covered lately, from Amazon changing how returnless refunds work to Google turning your store into an optional checkout step. The platforms keep reminding us who is actually in charge. If you run high-ticket products, the answer is not to abandon marketplaces, it is to stop letting one of them own you. I have a full breakdown of the risks of building on someone else’s marketplace that is worth reading before you put more eggs in that basket.
The fix is a store you control. On Shopify you own the domain, the customer email list, the checkout, and the brand, and no activist investor can vote those away from you. That is the entire reason I push high-ticket operators toward their own store first and marketplaces second. If reading this and realizing how exposed you are makes you want someone to just build the thing for you, that is exactly what my turnkey done-for-you store build exists for. We stand up the store, the suppliers, and the systems so your revenue is not hostage to a boardroom fight.
If this made you realize how much of your income runs through a platform you do not own, start here. My free beginner guide walks you through building a store that is actually yours. Get the free beginner guide →
What To Do This Week
You do not need to panic-sell your eBay listings. You need to stop being a single-channel operator. Here is the order I would run it in.
- Pull your numbers and find your platform concentration. If more than half your revenue comes from one marketplace you do not own, that is your single biggest business risk, bigger than any product or supplier issue.
- Stand up your own store if you have not already. Shopify gets you a real storefront in a weekend, and my step-by-step guide to starting a high-ticket store covers the full setup.
- Lock down your business foundation so the boring infrastructure never moves. Form your LLC through Bizee or LegalZoom, and if you want to understand why this matters before you file, read my breakdown of why your store needs an LLC.
- Build a traffic source you own. Organic search does not get bought out from under you, so start ranking your own content. I run keyword research through SEMRush on every store I build.
- Get your money and your books in order. Use Wise for clean cross-border payouts and Finaloop so you always know your real margin when a platform changes its fees.
- If you want a second set of eyes on your specific situation, my private coaching is built for exactly this, or you can book a discovery call and we will map out where your revenue is most exposed.
If hiring help is the bottleneck, you can bring on a trained store manager from OnlineJobs.ph for a fraction of a US hire and have them run the parts you hate.
Frequently Asked Questions
Will GameStop actually end up owning eBay?
Probably not. The bid relies mostly on derivatives rather than real shares, the financing depends on a credit rating analysts doubt, and eBay’s three largest holders alone control more than 22% and have no reason to sell to a hostile bidder.
Should I stop selling on eBay because of this?
No. eBay is still a profitable, well-run marketplace with strong collectibles demand. The point is to make sure it is one of several channels, not your only one.
What happens to sellers if a takeover does go through?
Fee structures, payout terms, and seller protections all sit with whoever controls the board, so a change in ownership is a change in your operating terms. That uncertainty is the reason to own a store outside the marketplace.
Why does Cohen want eBay so badly?
eBay throws off a 31% operating margin and steady cash flow, which dwarfs GameStop’s 10%. For an owner-operator looking for a bigger engine, that profitability is the prize.
Is this like the meme-stock era again?
It rhymes. Cohen is the same figure from the 2021 GameStop run, and his playbook still leans on retail-investor enthusiasm and stock issuance. The difference is eBay is a healthy company, not a distressed one.
What is the single best move I can make right now?
Reduce your dependence on any platform you do not own by building your own high-ticket store in a niche you control, then treat marketplaces as extra distribution instead of your foundation.
Want my private weekly breakdowns and store teardowns, including how I am positioning my own stores around this marketplace shake-up? Join the Patreon →
Cohen may sit and wait, or he may force a tender offer the analysts say cannot work. Either way, the sellers who come out of this fine will be the ones who already own their channel. Build the store you control, and let the boardroom fight be someone else’s problem. Subscribe to the YouTube channel for daily breakdowns. More breaking news later today.
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Trevor Fenner is an ecommerce entrepreneur and the founder of Ecommerce Paradise, a platform focused on helping entrepreneurs build and scale profitable high-ticket ecommerce and dropshipping businesses. With over a decade of hands-on experience, Trevor specializes in high-ticket dropshipping strategy, niche and product selection, supplier recruiting and onboarding, Google & Bing Shopping ads, ecommerce SEO, and systems-driven automation and scaling. Through Ecommerce Paradise, he provides free education via in-depth guides like How to Start High-Ticket Dropshipping, advanced training through the High-Ticket Dropshipping Masterclass, and fully done-for-you turnkey ecommerce services for entrepreneurs who want a faster, more hands-off path to growth. Trevor is known for emphasizing sustainable, real-world ecommerce models over hype-driven tactics, helping store owners build scalable, sellable, and location-independent brands.
