GSI Commerce

GSI Commerce, Inc. was the King of Prussia, Pennsylvania e-commerce company founded by Michael G. Rubin in 1995 as Global Sports Incorporated, which built and ran online stores for major brick-and-mortar brands and retailers and supplied the marketing, customer care, payments, fulfilment and fraud services around them. GSI traded on Nasdaq as GSIC. eBay Inc. acquired the company in June 2011 for $2.4 billion and renamed it eBay Enterprise in 2013; eBay sold the business in November 2015 for $925 million, and its enterprise operations merged with Innotrac in April 2016 to form Radial, later acquired by Belgium's bpost.

Company Profile

The May 2012 summary in the record describes GSI under eBay ownership: a leading provider of e-commerce and interactive marketing services for the world's premier brands and retailers, offering a broad suite of solutions to power each aspect of an online business and integrate it with other channels, as an eBay Inc. company. Fulfilment centres, call centres and a technology platform were the physical substance behind that description.

The company's arc tracks the first era of enterprise e-commerce: founded in the 1990s selling sporting goods online, it became the outsourced web store behind hundreds of established retailers that did not want to build their own — which is precisely why eBay, a marketplace with no such services arm, paid $2.4 billion for it, and why the business still exists today under the Radial name.

The range behind the name is e-commerce platforms, marketing, customer care, payments and fulfilment services. Its customers are premier brands and brick-and-mortar retailers selling online, principally in North America and Europe. That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place GSI Commerce in the industry: it explains the company's costs, its competitors and the kind of news that moved its shares when it had them. A change in either half of the combination, a new product category or a new customer, is usually the first sign that the business described in the older summaries is turning into something different.

Scale should be read from the dated summaries with their dates attached. Store counts, sales descriptions and market positions quoted there were the company's own account of itself in that year, and they are the right basis for comparing GSI Commerce with the other companies in this section — a component supplier against a retailer, or a catalogue house against a mall chain — as long as each figure is compared with figures from roughly the same period.

For current dealings, the snapshot at the top of this page is the place to start: it gives the company's present status — Acquired — eBay bought GSI Commerce in June 2011 for $2.4 billion, renamed it eBay Enterprise in 2013 and sold it in November 2015; its enterprise operations became Radial in 2016 — and links to the official website, which is where current product ranges, store information and investor or corporate contacts are maintained. Anything in the dated summaries that conflicts with the snapshot should be read as the older position: summaries describe the year they are dated, and the snapshot describes the company as it stands now.

The stock record matters because GSI Commerce sat at a point where fashion meets the public markets: investors following the shares were really following spending by brands and retailers on outsourced e-commerce operations. The dated company summaries gathered in this section were written for that audience, recording store counts, sales descriptions and company statements as they stood at the time. Read together with the current status above, they show both halves of the story — the business as it presented itself in its listed years, and what became of it afterwards.