eBay’s Quarterly Business Results

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eBay’s Quarterly Business Results

• Q2 was a strong quarter for eBay, with $18.2 billion total GMV
• Our Focus Category innovations expanded in scope and positively influenced growth for the marketplace overall
• eBay continues to pioneer experiences, services and technology – from Authentication and AI to Live Commerce and Extended Auctions – to reinvent the future of ecommerce

This comes a bit delayed as I was — as I hope many of you have also enjoyed this summer — on an always-too-short summer break with the family. I’m back, refreshed and energized, and eager to share a few thoughts about eBay’s most recent Q2 results, which were strong across all metrics. 

But first, I want to thank you, our sellers, for your partnership and contributions to eBay’s continued momentum. For the past three years, our focus has been on building the world’s best marketplace through a tech-led reimagination: innovating to adapt to buyers’ changing needs, delivering world-class Focus Category experiences, and transforming our marketing strategy to attract and retain enthusiast buyers. For every accomplishment we’ve achieved, your passion and remarkable inventory have been instrumental.

Turning to some of the highlights of Q2, we continued to expand on eBay’s reputation as a trusted global destination, and drive even more consumers to shop your inventory with confidence. More specifically, we:

• Expanded Authenticity Guarantee to streetwear in the US, to kids’ sneakers in the US and UK, and to trading cards in Canada. These entries expand and add more layers of trust to the overall eBay experience.
• Introduced our Certified by Brand program, providing shoppers a wider selection of trusted luxury brands and inventory.
• Finalized our acquisition of Certilogo, an AI-powered luxury fashion authentication solution that serves as a digital product ‘passport,’ and invested in Sideline Swap, a sporting goods trade-in platform, further solidifying eBay as a trusted destination for these categories.

We also accelerated our product roadmap to give you new tools for growing your businesses by:

• Opening up our Live Commerce Streaming experience to allow more of you to stream live commerce events directly through the eBay app, while also introducing Extended Auctions on eBay Live – extending an auction's time if a new bid is received in the last seconds of an auction.
• Launching the first version of our AI-powered listing description generator using Azure OpenAI in the Android and iOS eBay apps – a “magical listing” solution to dramatically reduce the time it takes for you to fill in listing descriptions and Item Specifics.

Harnessing technology for your business

Q2 saw a lot of good results, but eBay has always been an innovator. In fact, it was 15 years ago last month that we made history with the introduction of one of the first mobile apps, launched as part of Apple’s App Store when it opened in 2008. In the years since, we’ve pioneered even more tech, including the use of artificial intelligence (AI) — a term we’re hearing a lot of lately — to keep you at the forefront of ecommerce tools, insights and trends.

Fast-forward to today, and AI is inspiring an explosion of creativity at eBay to help you merchandize, and buyers discover, your products with significantly more accuracy and less effort. We’re working on innovations like camera-based listing, where our image-recognition technology will let you start and even pre-populate a product’s title, category, description and item specifics based on a photo. There’s “Shop by Upgrade,” which uses Generative AI to help buyers discover the right upgrade for their vehicles, and “Engine Code Lookup” that helps address the root cause of hard-to-decipher vehicle error codes. And so much more to come…

Reinventing the future of ecommerce

When our CEO, Jamie Iannone, returned to eBay three years ago, he set a goal to become the best global marketplace through a tech-led reimagination of eBay, guided by a Focus Category strategy. Today, this vision has not just put us on a path of continued, sustainable growth, it’s set eBay up to connect with and earn the loyalty of the next generation of ecommerce consumers and enthusiasts. More importantly, it’s become the foundation for an even more ambitious vision — to reinvent the future of ecommerce for enthusiasts, only on eBay, based on three key pillars: relevant experiences, scalable solutions, and magical innovations.

Through our Focus Category strategy, we’ve proven that relevant experiences improve customer satisfaction and grow GMV, and we’ll continue to tackle and invest in category-specific improvements across the marketplace like we have for sneakers, trading cards, handbags, luxury watches, jewelry, automotive parts & accessories, and refurbished. As we enter the next strategic phase, our focus on creating relevant experiences in even more categories will accelerate — to ensure a more modernized buying and selling journey for even more eBay enthusiasts.

Our scale is, and remains, a massive asset, making technologies and capabilities developed for one category quickly adaptable to others. For instance, eBay’s Authenticity Guarantee – which has transformed trust in sneakers, watches, jewelry, handbags and trading cards – is becoming increasingly faster and more cost efficient to launch in new categories (like streetwear and kids sneakers) and global markets (like the UK, Canada, Germany, and Australia).  

Finally, we are committed to piloting even more experiments resulting in game-changing, magical innovations that put you at the front of ecommerce — exciting offerings like Live Commerce, trading solutions like the eBay Vault, and our new AI-powered listing description generator.

What’s ahead

The past three years have revealed how the continued fine-tuning of our strategy, innovation investments, and attention to enhancing the buying and selling journey, have and will continue to position us for success. This includes acquisitions like Certilogo, who’s technology positions us to better protect customers from counterfeits to grow recommerce trust. It involves partnerships like our latest with Techstars, and the introduction of a new accelerator program to support more ecommerce innovation. And it leads to investments in category-specific players like SidelineSwap, to encourage greater resale adoption among enthusiasts…  

Over the next quarters and years we’ll strive to introduce even more exciting marketplace advancements that benefit your businesses. In fact, we’ll be sharing a LOT of what’s ahead at eBay Open ‘23 (September 26-29) so be sure to register, where we’ll connect, celebrate and deliver a packed agenda both in person and virtually.

I have never been more confident that we are on the right path to unlocking the enormous untapped potential of eBay, nor more keen to share how the foundation we’ve laid is setting the stage for the next ambitious phase of our journey. Our tech-led reimagination will not only continue, including our expansion of Focus Categories and related initiatives, but will accelerate and evolve as we embark on the next phase of eBay’s strategy. 

Through it all, I’m grateful that you’re on this journey with us. So thank you for your partnership, and as always – thank you for selling on eBay.

Adam Ireland

VP & GM, eBay US

For more on eBay’s Q2 2023 earnings visit https://www.ebayinc.com/