Ebay Stitches Together Commerce Marketing Platform from Acquired Tech

Acquiring marketing service technologies is one thing. Making them talk to one another is quite another. Ebay says it's ready to unveil an integrated marketing platform the ecommerce giant has stitched together from several platform purchases made in recent years, many of which came in one fell swoop with its $2.4 billion acquisition of GSI Commerce in 2011. The gelled product is intended to be used specifically by commerce clients. Currently over 2,000 business customers, including web retailers and mid-market clients, use the separate services, which include eDialog for email and Pepperjam for affiliate-marketing, according to Steve Denton, VP of marketing solutions for eBay Enterprise. Clients include Toys "R" Us and Alex and Ani. "We absolutely anticipate that they'll be using that integrated platform," said Mr. Denton. Ebay will not make the conjoined platform available until Q1 2015. He said he expects to migrate clients over to the new platform by the end of March 2015. The system was pieced together by FICO, the firm best known for its credit-scoring services, which also provides tech and analytics services. "We're leveraging their technology and analytics expertise as part of our core platform," said Mr. Denton. The companies were already partnering on smaller projects beforehand. The platform, which sits on a DMP, will allow clients to combine their own proprietary data with third-party data and information from eBay itself, and could be used for things like website optimization and social- media ad retargeting based on previous product views. For example, a retailer could match its email list to eBay registration data, then connect that matched ID to a mobile device or online cookie to aim display ads at customers who don't open emails. Mr. Denton said eBay would not tap into any data flowing through the enterprise commerce platform for its own purposes. "Your data as a client is your data," he said.

Ebay Stitches Together Commerce Marketing Platform from Acquired Tech

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