eBay could have applied AI to its operations just by reading some.
Summary: cowboykites1 criticizes eBay's management and board for hindering growth due to lack of innovation and reactive governance, causing market share erosion and underperforming stock prices. tobaccocardyahoo responds by suggesting that eBay excels in niches where larger competitors like Amazon and Walmart do not compete, such as collectibles. The discussion also highlights strategic choices by eBay that align with profitability rather than competing directly with giants requiring extensive warehousing and logistics.
Over the last decade, eBay’s management and board have severely hindered the company's growth through a chronic lack of innovation, platform neglect, and reactive corporate governance. Throughout the tenures of recent CEOs like Devin Wenig and Jamie Iannone, leadership struggled to modernize eBay's aging marketplace infrastructure, alienating its core base of small, third-party sellers with high fee structures and a flawed search algorithm. Rather than proactively building a competitive edge against agile giants like Amazon or specialized platforms like Etsy and Shopify, the board remained heavily siloed and slow to adapt to changing e-commerce dynamics. This leadership stagnation forced the company into an operational corner, relying on desperate, late-stage rollouts of "managed payments" and authenticated luxury niches to patch up a fundamentally eroding market share.
These persistent managerial failures created intense downward pressure on eBay's stock price, causing it to drastically underperform the broader tech and e-commerce sectors for years. This prolonged stagnation turned eBay into a prime target for activist hedge funds like Elliott Management and Starboard Value, whose aggressive interventions in the late 2010s exposed the board’s inability to unlock value independently. To appease Wall Street and defend the stock, management was forced into a massive structural retreat—spinning off high-growth auxiliary assets like StubHub and its valuable Classifieds Group just to fund short-term stock buybacks. This defensive strategy temporarily propped up EPS but left investors highly skeptical of eBay's long-term organic growth, cementing a permanent valuation discount relative to its peers.
inhawaii
·2 weeks agoThank you for that information.
I will take the appropriate action.
dbmm-media
·2 weeks agoai slop
tobaccocardyahoo
·2 weeks agoAmazon and Walmart would deny that Ebay competes with them.
Shopify would probably be considered an Amazon competitor, in the way that a gnat is a pest.
Etsy lacks a long term strategy for success.
IMO Ebay has great strength in some categories which Amazon, Walmart and Etsy, do not compete.
Your problem appears to be that you want Ebay to be in businesses it has decided to let whither on the vine because they were not adequately profitable to justify the massive investment Amazon and Walmart are making in warehousing, and logistics as well as marketing. And because Ebay does not want to bar the sellers who are not manufacturer authorized resellers, who are required to be on the larger marketplaces.
Amazon has abandoned most collectibles categories leaving Ebay to be the leading marketplace. The Amazon requirement for manufacturer authorization has led to an exodus from many sellers, including booksellers who have been unable to list certain publishers' products without being authorized by the manufacturer.
I will not buy any name brand products which should have a manufacturer's warranty on Ebay, because many of the NEW products sold on Ebay lack one.