eBay buys German fashion shopping site Brands4friends

By Geoff Duncan December 20, 2010

Online auction firm eBay is looking to expand its footprint in international online retailing: the company has just announced an agreement to acquire Germany’s Brands4friends, which claims to be Germany’s largest online shopping club for “fashion and lifestyle” that offers discounts and daily deals to more than 3.5 million members. eBay will be paying €150 million (about US$200 million) to acquire all shares of the company.

Image used with permission by copyright holder

“We want to give our customers the best possible fashion experience online,” said eBay’s VP for Europe Doug McCallum, in a statement. “With the acquisition of brands4friends, we will enter the online shopping club market with an established and dynamic partner who has the expertise, relationships, and passion to match our own ambition.”

As part of the acquisition, eBay also takes over Brands4friends’ stakes in the UK shopping club SecretSales.com as well as the Japanese version of Brands4friends.

The move bolsters eBay as European online fashion retailer; in the last year and a half the company has launched eBay Outlet sites in the UK and Germany, and has been working with designers to make collections available exclusively to eBay customers. eBay says its research shows that online fashion clubs like Brands4friends already account for about 20 percent of all online fashion sales in Europe, and that the company already generates more than $5.4 billion a year in sales of clothing, shoes, and fashion accessories worldwide.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…

Computing

AMD’s next-gen CPUs are much closer than we thought

AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D held between fingertips.

We already knew that AMD would launch its Zen 5 CPUs this year, but recent motherboard updates hint that a release is imminent. Both MSI and Asus have released updates for their 600-series motherboards that explicitly add support for "next-generation AMD Ryzen processors," setting the stage for AMD's next-gen CPUs.

This saga started a few days ago when hardware leaker 9550pro spotted an MSI BIOS update, which they shared on X (formerly Twitter). Since then, Asus has followed suit with BIOS updates of its own featuring a new AMD Generic Encapsulated Software Architecture (AGESA) -- the firmware responsible for starting the CPU -- that brings support for next-gen CPUs (spotted by VideoCardz).

Computing

AMD Zen 5: Everything we know about AMD’s next-gen CPUs

The AMD Ryzen 5 8600G APU installed in a motherboard.

AMD Zen 5 is the next-generation Ryzen CPU architecture for Team Red and is slated for a launch sometime in 2024. We've been hearing tantalizing rumors for a while now and promises of big leaps in performance. In short, Zen 5 could be very exciting indeed.

We don't have all the details, but what we're hearing is very promising. Here's what we know about Zen 5 so far.
Zen 5 release date and availability
AMD confirmed in January 2024 that it was on track to launch Zen 5 sometime in the "second half of the year." Considering the launch of Zen 4 was in September 2022, we would expect to see Zen 5 desktop processors debut around the same timeframe, possibly with an announcement in the summer at Computex.

Computing

Is this Razer’s Steam Deck killer?

The Razer Kishi Ultra sitting on a table.

Razer has been oddly quiet in the burgeoning world of handheld gaming PCs. When I met up with the company at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) to learn about its new products, I was happy to hear it had an answer to the success of the Steam Deck.

But it was not the type of answer I was expecting.