Crystal ball: GameStop is exploring a deal that would dramatically reshape its position in e-commerce, and it's setting its sights on a target several times its own size. The videogame retailer is preparing a potential offer for eBay, according to people familiar with the matter, as CEO Ryan Cohen pushes to move the company past its legacy retail roots and into something with a much larger online footprint.

The size mismatch is hard to overlook. GameStop carries a market value of around $12 billion; eBay sits closer to $46 billion. Despite that gap, GameStop has already been quietly building a stake in eBay ahead of a potential bid – a signal that Cohen is willing to swing big rather than chip away at e-commerce incrementally.

Markets moved fast after the news broke. eBay shares jumped more than 10% in after-hours trading, and GameStop climbed around 5%, as investors registered a mix of optimism and curiosity about what this combination could actually look like.

eBay brings real infrastructure to the table. Its global marketplace includes mature tooling for payments, search, seller management, and category oversight, especially in collectibles and fashion, two areas where GameStop has been quietly trying to stake a claim online.

Cohen hasn't been shy about his intentions. In late January, he told The Wall Street Journal he was actively evaluating targets in consumer and retail as part of a broader push to scale. That ambition is baked into his compensation structure as well: GameStop reworked his pay package earlier this year, tying potential payouts (reportedly up to $35 billion in stock) to aggressive benchmarks, including a target of pushing the company's valuation to $100 billion.

Financing a deal of this magnitude would lean heavily on GameStop's balance sheet. The company had roughly $9 billion in cash at the end of March, up from $4.8 billion a year prior, giving it meaningful flexibility – though a deal for eBay would almost certainly blow past available cash and would likely require a mix of stock and a direct appeal to shareholders if eBay's board pushes back.

That scenario is being taken seriously. If eBay isn't receptive, Cohen could go around the board and take the offer straight to its shareholders. How that plays out would be a genuine test of whether institutional investors and GameStop's retail-heavy shareholder base actually buy into this vision.

Both stocks have had a strong run as of late. GameStop is up roughly 30% this year, with no small part of that tied to dealmaking expectations. eBay has climbed more than 50% over the past year as it refocuses on higher-value categories; its $1.2 billion acquisition of Depop was a clear move in that direction, targeting secondhand fashion and a younger demographic.

For GameStop, acquiring eBay would sidestep years of painful infrastructure buildout. Rather than constructing payment systems, trust frameworks, and seller networks from scratch, Cohen would be buying a platform that already operates at global scale. The trade-off would be the complexity of integrating systems and communities that were built for different businesses.

Cohen has made long bets before. As co-founder of Chewy, he built a digital retail operation around logistics and customer experience before most traditional retailers had figured out their online strategy. His early critique of GameStop was precisely that it had moved too slowly into e-commerce, an argument that helped land him a board seat in 2021, when the company was valued at just over $1 billion.

A bid for eBay would be his most audacious move yet: a shift from iterating on the margins to swinging for scale through acquisition, and an attempt to reposition GameStop not just as a retailer with an online store, but as part of the underlying infrastructure that makes online commerce work.

Masthead credit: Retail Dive