eBay Lays Off ~1000 Employees, CEO Blames Macroeconomic Headwinds, Expenses Outpace Growth

[valueaddedresource]

Breaking news: eBay is laying off 1,000 employees, about 9% of workforce. CEO Jamie Iannone says headcount and expenses are outpacing growth.

Exact details about specific areas affected have not been disclosed, so not sure what the impact on sellers will be yet but...this does not bode well for the Q4 report in my opinion. 👀

https://www.ebayinc.com/stories/news/ensuring-ebays-long-term-success/

We are on a path to building a stronger eBay for the future — one that is growing, and resilient in the face of any challenge. Over the past three years, we made fundamental changes in our experiences across categories and accelerated the pace of innovation at eBay. In areas where we’re investing, we are seeing consistent increases in customer satisfaction and a meaningful improvement in our growth relative to the market.

Our strategy is the right one, but there is more we can do to ensure our success. We need to better organize our teams for speed — allowing us to be more nimble, bring like-work together, and help us make decisions more quickly. Today, I am sharing news about changes we are implementing to better position eBay for long-term, sustainable growth.

The most significant and toughest of these decisions is to reduce our current workforce by approximately 1,000 roles or an estimated 9% of full-time employees. Additionally, we plan to scale back the number of contracts we have within our alternate workforce over the coming months. These are not actions we take lightly — and we recognize the impact they will have on all eBayers. We have to say goodbye to people who have made so many important contributions to the eBay community and culture, and this isn’t easy.

The Need for Change

Despite facing external pressures, like the challenging macroeconomic environment, we know we can be better with the factors we control. While we are making progress against our strategy, our overall headcount and expenses have outpaced the growth of our business. To address this, we're implementing organizational changes that align and consolidate certain teams to improve the end-to-end experience, and better meet the needs of our customers around the world.

[greatmidwestcoin]

It's all about managing by "fear". You obtain higher productivity when that kicks in. Just a business fact.

[my-cottage-books-and-antiques]

Well, I can't say that I am surprised. I've been saying for a long time that eBay seems to be way behind schedule on a number of things, and does not seem to have a clue as to how to get back on schedule. I'm not too sure eliminating positions is going to be the solution, but time will tell.

[rugerskick]

They only have one main plan to increase profits.  To find more ways to take money from sellers.  

Its proving its not working well enough.  

They don't really seem to care much.

[chariot_badges]

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@hartungcards wrote:

macroeconomic headwinds are one of many unfortunate side effects of global warming.

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That's funny.   Thank you.   LoL

And see ... I thought it was Trumps fault.

[chariot_badges]

Does this mean that Customer Service will get better?

[antflan77]

   I believe all of you are wrong. This is a textbook case of not understanding Microeconomic Tailwinds.

Geez SMH Mic drop etc LOL

[janet9988]

I , personally do not buy off of Walmart or Target unless it is a direct store product. In fact I stay away from shopping with them all together if at all possible, which is not hard to do.

I buy in store for any drop-shipped type items. I don't mind paying more to buy directly from a  local company for everyday items.

I always get exactly what i need.

I personally think more and more buyers are recognizing the problem with 3rd party vendors.

[broto_64]

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@fern*wood wrote:

I had no idea they had that many employees.  Makes me wonder…

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No doubt, way ebay is ran I had figured they had maybe 100 employees total...
And if the 1000 they laid off accounts for 9% that means they're left with close to 10,000...
What exactly do they do all day?

Wouldn't 1,000 of that be enough to cover customer service phone lines?

Another 1,000 whose sole mission is to debug the site?

Granted, ebay does have millions of buyers and sellers.

Still, seems to wasteful.

Tell you what thou, I am pretty sure they do not see their little in-house seller "promotion" programs they started as being part of the problem, but I do.

[luckythewinner]

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@12345jamesstamps wrote:

eBay has suffered bugs where buyers can't add items to the shopping cart

This doesn't happen with other companies. 

You can add items in a shopping cart in other companies that sell items

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I did a quick Google of amazon shopping cart bug. 

It appears that bugs like this have happened at other companies. 

[broto_64]

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@12345jamesstamps wrote:

They are losing money in the "authentication"...but they are not even full time employees or employees. LOL

"eBay has suffered bugs where buyers can't add items to the shopping cart, or get through the checkout and pay for their order". This hits sales...and may reduce eBay's overall traffic, because buyers start to lose confidence in the service." This doesn't happen with other companies. You can add items in a shopping cart in other companies that sell items. It makes no sense to me. Maybe that .30 per item charge for buying several items?

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How corporations even exist is baffling to me as well.

Years (decades) ago I got into web site development and in that process I learned to run validators on HTML documents (which in layman's terms is a web site "test" on the programming level)... And anyone can run such a test on any website because html is publicly accessible.

One day I ran such a test on a grand corporate web site, one of the big names, many out there but household name web site... And I was astounded, the number of errors on just the homepage is quite high.

That said I just ran an html validator on ebay.com (their homepage only) from the w3c.
It shows 596 errors on just that one page, that includes anything from "warnings" (also known as "yellow" or not serious errors) all the way to fatal errors which means that part doesn't work at all and can even cause other parts to not work.

That would explain the bugs you mention, in fact it comes as no surprise.

Sadly, the corporate solution is to simply purchase more server power.

Bigger, better servers to faster serve up garbage (errors do slow content delivery among other things).

Sadly ebay is no exception here, every single large corporate website, same thing.
Sadly as well, these employees who just got laid off are paying the price for this.

[broto_64]

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@tools* wrote:

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@fern*wood wrote:

I had no idea they had that many employees.  Makes me wonder…

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eBay is tiny with only about 10,000 employees. 1,541,000 people work for Amazon.

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Yes but at least Amazon has their fulfillment warehouses that ship orders out which account for a large portion of their work force, ebay with its individual sellers has no such excuse.

[broto_64]

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@toomuchstuffagain35 wrote:

I LOVE corporate speak, almost as good as AI.

"macroeconomic headwinds"? LMAO

Maybe if they learned to speak straightforward language instead of all this bleep?

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I can translate:

Our own errors are holding us back.

[chapeau-noir]

@broto_64  I found this dismaying, but a while back eBay was talking about building their own servers (they tried to make it sound gourmet but it just sounded like McDonald's to me). This is in light of the fact that the joke in IT circles is if you can't get a job anywhere else, eBay will hire you.

But TBH, I've run into horrible website design in a lot of places - Mercari is awful.

[ed8108]

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@broto_64 wrote:No doubt, way ebay is ran I had figured they had maybe 100 employees total...
And if the 1000 they laid off accounts for 9% that means they're left with close to 10,000...
What exactly do they do all day?

Granted, ebay does have millions of buyers and sellers.

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But for how much longer will they remain before manny decide to leave

[broto_64]

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@janet9988 wrote:

I , personally do not buy off of Walmart or Target unless it is a direct store product. In fact I stay away from shopping with them all together if at all possible, which is not hard to do.

I buy in store for any drop-shipped type items. I don't mind paying more to buy directly from a  local company for everyday items.

I always get exactly what i need.

I personally think more and more buyers are recognizing the problem with 3rd party vendors.

---

Same here, I used to order from Walmart until one day I had a problem with an order some years ago.
In terms of money I should've given up, I spent hours on the phone with them and got nowhere, all over a $10 order... But I was irritated at the prospect and I gave chase until they gave me my refund.

I won't do that again, the fact Walmart doesn't have an MBG like ebay threw me for a loop, and their third party sellers can easily give a buyer the run-around with their canned answers. I rarely buy from Walmart online, ebay can be tricky in these regards as well but ebay's MBG is ironclad and over the years I've learned to tell individual sellers apart from big box and dropshippers (thou big box / dropship can be hard to distinguish sometimes). Which, granted I could probably go through the learning experience with Walmart but I'm just not willing to put in the effort anymore.

One more thing, Walmart sent me an invitation to sell there and I applied, and was declined, apparently for life (I still get emails to the effect, they are filtered to the trash). They also still send me invitations to sell, these emails also are filtered, I would be near tears if I had to continue seeing these... 

Ebay isn't the only broken marketplace, rest assured of that.