Resale
Operations Briefing

Ryan Cohen looked at the entire e-commerce landscape and decided the most valuable thing in it was a secondhand marketplace. He's probably not going to get it. But he's not wrong about why it matters.

Last week GameStop made an unsolicited offer to acquire eBay for $125 per share - roughly $55.5 billion, split 50/50 cash and stock. The financing maths don't quite work: GameStop has about $9.4bn in liquid assets and a highly-confident letter from TD Securities for up to $20bn, which still leaves a substantial gap on the cash side. Analysts were sceptical. eBay's share price traded well below the offer. Cohen then opened an eBay storefront, reportedly to "help fund the acquisition."

Strip away the noise and something more interesting remains.

Cohen's actual thesis, laid out in GameStop's formal proposal, isn't about brand nostalgia or meme-stock energy. It's operational. He argued eBay spent $2.4bn on sales and marketing in 2025 to acquire roughly one million net new active buyers. He argued the cost structure is bloated and the platform is under-earning against its asset base. And he argued that GameStop's 1,600 US stores could become physical infrastructure for eBay - authentication centres, drop-off points, fulfilment nodes, trade-in hubs.

That last part is what operators should pay attention to.

We've spent lot of time with resale operators in Europe and North America, and the pattern Cohen is describing - physical proximity improving trust, intake, and sell-through - is exactly what the better-performing operators have been quietly building. Local processing beats centralised hubs for textiles. Authentication at point-of-intake beats authentication at a distant facility. Convenience at the supply end drives everything downstream.

Cohen didn't discover this by studying resale. He arrived at it by looking at a marketplace with 136 million active buyers, nearly $80bn in annual GMV, and a $1.2bn acquisition of Depop in progress - and asking what was still missing. The answer, apparently, is physical infrastructure that makes secondhand feel as easy as buying new.

eBay had already been moving in that direction: AI listing tools, authentication guarantees on focus categories, integrated shipping, a deliberate narrowing to collectibles, fashion, and refurbished goods. Q1 2026 GMV grew 18%. The platform written off five years ago is now worth $56bn to someone who studies capital allocation for a living.

The deal will probably not close. But the diagnosis stands: resale infrastructure - the systems that turn messy, individual supply into trusted, searchable, purchasable inventory - is now one of the more strategically contested assets in commerce. The operators building that infrastructure, whether through AI-powered listing, local reconditioning, or systematic authentication, are building something that compounds.

The first thing ever sold on eBay was a broken laser pointer - and the buyer knew it was broken. Thirty years on, the whole game is still trust, data, and the right price.