Jeff Bezos and Amazon have been taking up a lot of space on our newsfeeds.

First, on July 5, Bezos officially stepped aside as CEO of Amazon (AMZN), which he founded in 1994 and built into a $1.8 trillion e-commerce giant.

Second, just two weeks later on July 20, the self-made billionaire roared into outer space, becoming one of the few private citizens to do so.

Then, last Friday the company missed revenue estimates and the market was further shocked when the tech giant called for considerably slower revenue growth of just 10%-16% in the third quarter.

It’s not uncommon for people or corporations to lose popularity when they’re over-exposed in the press. Amazon is no different.

A recent story in the Wall Street Journal profiled a group of companies vying to unseat the King of Ecommerce. To me, the story came up short because it ignored the original Amazon challenger that’s been around since 1995.

Trading at just 2% of its famous competitor’s price, this ignored stock has beaten Amazon’s return this year by a stunning 12.30%

Let me show you why there’s so much upside ahead…

The Rise of the “Anti-Amazon”

One of the featured companies from the WSJ article, ShopIN.nyc, works with local New York City-based companies to pool their products into joint warehouses.

ShopIN.nyc is a direct counterweight to Amazon that focuses on bringing together local businesses. The idea is that together they can compete with Amazon’s all-encompassing retail platform, and keep the proceeds within their own communities rather than seeing them go to a single global monolith.

Their spirit of antagonism towards Amazon is less than subtle in their social media campaigns, which boast taglines like “Shop Boroughs, Not Bezo$” and “An ‘everything store’ that delivers faster than Amazon.”

Though they are not publicly traded, they’re far from the only eCommerce players capitalizing on Amazon’s bad press.

Last year, Facebook Inc. launched something similar called “Facebook Shops,” with the aim of supporting smaller, local businesses in competing against Amazon.

Alphabet Inc.’s Google is on the same track, working to enable smaller companies to sell via Google and integrate with payment and delivery companies such as Square, Inc.

All three of those are great stocks but they’re not purely ecommerce plays. And as I noted earlier, one of the more important competitors to Amazon went completely unmentioned in the Wall Street Journal article even though they are growing more than ten times faster than Amazon.

You’re not going to want to make the same mistake by overlooking the opportunity they are offering.

The OG E-Commerce Play

The company I have in mind started shortly after Amazon got going. It’s an early adopter of e-commerce, but with a twist; buyers get to choose between buying now or putting in bids in online auctions.

You may have heard of it; it’s called eBay Inc. (EBAY).

Founded in 1995 as AuctionWeb, the company was the first real avenue for people to buy and sell things to each other over the Internet.

From the very beginning, the kinds of things that are bought and sold on the site span the gamut from ordinary to odd. For example, the very first sale happened when founder Pierre Omidyar listed a broken laser pointer. The buyer, it turned out, was a collector of exactly that – broken laser pointers.

eBay exemplifies one of my favorite qualities in an undervalued stock - effortless momentum. When a company’s product or service is so integral to the market, very little can get in the way of its growth.

The Master of Niche

I myself used eBay a lot back when I was a musician, buying and selling instruments and tools.

That experience recently came in very handy, when I was looking for a very specialized type of water-based varnish that was not available on Amazon or any other site. I ended up finding it through an Australian dealer on eBay of all places.

They sell everything from rare varnishes and broken laser pointers to new or used smartphones, computers to designer clothing and vintage goods. It’s a flea market, auction house, online hub for big and small retailers, and a place for digital yard sales, all rolled into one.

Because users can rate both buyers and sellers they’ve interacted with, much of the risk of sending money or goods to strangers online is reduced. Of course, eBay also handles escrow accounts to reduce as much as possible cases of sellers not getting their money.

International Expansion & Acquisition

The company has lately been shoring up the balance sheet and operations by selling some units. In June, for example, eBay announced it was selling just over 80% of its South Korean subsidiary to a local company.

The South Korean market is very different from most others, and so focusing on what eBay knows best elsewhere is better in the long run. A price of around $3 billion in cash certainly won’t hurt either.

Less than a month later, eBay announced another sale. This time, it was reducing its stake in Adevinta, a Norwegian classified-ads firm, from 44% to 34%.

In return, the company is getting $2.25 billion.

Mind you, that’s in addition to the $2.5 billion eBay made last year when it sold the same classified-ads business, then under its own umbrella, to Adevinta in the first place.

Even better, some of this money is going straight into investors’ pockets. As soon as the deal closed, eBay announced it was increasing its stock buyback program for 2021 from $2 billion to $5 billion.

Conclusion: You Can Teach an Old Dog New Tricks

So far this year, eBay has run circles around Amazon. As of last Friday’s close, they vaulted by 36% beating Amazon by a stunning 1,233%.

And there’s still plenty of upside ahead for eBay. eBay grew its earnings-per-share by 58% last quarter. Even if we cut that by more than half to 24% a year, we could still see a double in earnings in just three years.

We’ll get a better sense of how the firm is doing against its plan when it reports on August 11. Should it miss forecasts and the stock sells off, I would view this as a great buying opportunity.

After all, this is not just an online flea market – it’s a wealth-building tech stock.