Shares of eBay (EBAY) are down $1.47, or almost 3%, at $53.79, perhaps prompted by a note this morning from R.W. Baird’s Colin Sebastian, who reiterates an Outperform rating, and a $60 price target, while writing that his own home-brewed survey of February sales trends “suggests a slowdown in year-over-year growth to the low teens from mid/high teens in January.”
Sebastian opines that the slowdown “may reflect combined monthly effects of a tougher comp, consumer spending (e.g., higher taxes) and some deceleration in the Auto Parts category.”
“In the UK, we note that the British Retail Consortium reported e-commerce spending growth of +11% in February, steady with January.”
Meantime, he writes that the GSI Commerce unit of eBay is deploying new technology that could help third-party sales:
Our field checks suggest that GSI is in the process of rolling out its long-awaited v11 e-commerce platform upgrade to a small group of partner sites, including Christopher & Banks. The pace of new partner announcements appears to be increasing with the addition of Mexx Canada, and recent contract extensions with PetSmart and New York & Company. We believe that a successful rollout of v11 could help GSI accelerate growth and be more competitive against Demandware, ATG (Oracle) and Hybris.
Sebastian also comments briefly on the rumors Google (GOOG) is starting “a membership-based shopping and delivery service similar to Amazon.com (AMZN) Prime,” which he thinks would be a “natural next step” for the search giant following deployment of so-called product listing ads” (see yesterday’s report by Jefferies & Co.’s Brian Pitz for more on that).
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