Worldwide commerce leader eBay Inc. reported Friday it has acquired Seattle-based price research firm Decide.com, which specializes in helping consumers find the best times to buy products based on billions of data points from across the web. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Decide.com’s employees, including Chief Executive Mike Fridgen, will join eBay’s new Seattle-area office, while co-founder Oren Etzioni has just taken on a new role as the Executive Director of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. He will not be part of the new team at eBay.
“Technology innovation – and the engineers behind it – are critical to eBay’s mission of connecting buyers and sellers to the things they need and love,” said Mark Carges, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President, Global Products, Marketplaces. “Our vision is only as strong as the people behind our platform, so we are always looking to bring strong technologists into our company, especially those who are passionate about data and e-commerce and have developed products at web scale, into our organization.”
Immediate goals for Decide.com’s software developers and data scientists will include helping eBay build an improved pricing tool that helps sellers better price their merchandise and sell items faster, and leveraging their analytical skills to produce more detailed insights, intelligence and price guidance to sellers – information that will ultimately help sellers better compete, regardless of changing market dynamics.
“This is an exciting opportunity to bring Decide’s expertise in data and predictive analytics to the worldwide commerce leader and empower over 25 million eBay sellers,” said Mike Fridgen, CEO of Decide.com. “We believe teaming up with eBay allows us to realize our mission of leveling the playing field in commerce.”
The deal is the latest in a stream of targeted acquisitions for eBay, which has been actively growing its portfolio of technology in new and emerging frontiers of e-commerce, such as Social (Hunch), Local (Milo), Mobile (RedLaser) and now price forecasting (Decide.com).