One of the more interesting parts of the deal is that eBay is going to divest 100% of GSI’s licensed sports merchandise business, and 70% of ShopRunner (an AmazonPrime style program where customers can pay an annual fee for free 2-day shipping at various merchants) and sample sale site RueLaLa.

Those companies will be sold to a holding company led by GSI founder and CEO Michael Rubin, and eBay will loan the holding company $467 million while Rubin puts in $31 million of his own.

That leaves GSI’s e-commerce technology, fulfillment services, SmartBargains.com and a number of marketing companies including the Pepperjam affiliate network and ad re-targeter Fetchback under eBay’s fold.

It’s easy to understand why eBay wouldn’t want to be in the sports merchandising business if they’re trying to reinvent themselves as an e-commerce platform, but what’s less clear is what the divestment values RueLala and ShopRunner at. Though eBay will own 30%, those two businesses seem like they’re a perfect fit for some of eBay’s recent initiatives. eBay’s been putting muscle behind their fashion branding efforts for a while now, and RueLaLa would certainly help there. Under GSI’s ownership, the site is second only to Gilt’s sites when it comes to the US private/sample sale market. Clearly, the acquisition is an effort to compete with Amazon, and it’s hard to imagine extending the ShopRunner program to eBay merchants wouldn’t help them compete with the Amazon Prime program.

By keeping 30% of those companies and putting Rubin in charge, it’s clear that eBay also sees the value there. We have to wonder if the bigger story is what eBay values the 30% of those companies at.

Want to know where the wealthy shop online in the UK? Visit Signature9 UK for a look at the UK shopping sites popular with high earners.

It’s impossible to break out apparel shoppers for department store sites (many of which also sell home and garden items), so it should be noted than not every visitor browsing macys.com is there for clothing, beauty or jewelry items. But even if half of the visitors are there for dresses instead of dishes, Macy’s is attracting one of the largest (and richest) online shopping audiences.

Our data is from Google’s Ad Planner, which only offers visitor and demographic information going back one year. We can’t say if the economy has played a role in shifting online shopping preferences, but presently, wealthy online shoppers aren’t visiting luxury destinations in the same volume as they visit e-commerce sites with mid-level pricing. A possible silver lining for sites specializing in luxury sales: while they may not get the same volume of traffic, it’s quite possible that high end e-commerce sites earn more per sale and visitor.

Of the top 20 apparel e-commerce sites attracting the largest number of wealthy online shoppers, 6 (30%) are sites specializing in discount sales. Gilt and Rue La La are neck and neck for the title of the invitation sale site with the wealthiest visitors. Allowing for a small sampling error, the two sites could even reach the same number of wealthy visitors. The advantage, however, goes to Gilt Groupe, who attracts a combined 1.2 million visitors across the main Gilt site, and recently launched sister (and brother) sites Gilt Fuse and Gilt Man. Combined, Gilt Groupe attracts more visitors earning $100,000 or more than any other online only e-commerce apparel site besides Zappos. Pretty impressive for a company that’s not even 3 years old.

When it comes to visitors earning $100k or more per year, invitation sale sites may not have as many visitors as department stores, but as a percentage of visitors, a sizable portion are in this desirable online shopper demographic.

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