EBay

eBay Inc.
Type	Public
Traded as	Nasdaq: EBAY; S&P 500 component
Industry	E-commerce, online marketplace
Founded	3 September 1995 as AuctionWeb, San Jose, California
Founder	Pierre Omidyar
Headquarters	San Jose, California, United States
Area served	190 markets
Key people	Jamie Iannone (chief executive), Steve Priest (chief financial officer)
Services	Online marketplace, payments processing, authentication, advertising
Revenue	Approximately US$10.3 billion (2024)
Employees	Approximately 11,000
Website	ebay.com

eBay Inc. is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California. It operates online marketplaces in 190 markets worldwide on which individuals, businesses and governments buy and sell almost any lawful item, either by auction or at a fixed price under the Buy It Now format, and it charges sellers a commission on each sale. Founded by Pierre Omidyar in September 1995, it reported 132 million annual active buyers and about US$73 billion of transaction volume in 2023, 48 per cent of it in the United States, with a take rate, meaning revenue as a proportion of volume, of 13.81 per cent.

eBay's distinguishing characteristic has always been that it does not own the goods it sells. It holds no inventory, operates no warehouses in the manner of Amazon and takes no title to merchandise; it provides a venue, a reputation system in which buyers and sellers rate one another after each transaction, payment processing and dispute resolution. This made it capital-light and extremely profitable during its growth years, and it also made the company dependent on the behaviour of millions of independent sellers whose conduct it could influence but not control, which accounts for most of the controversy in its history.

The company's corporate structure was progressively simplified after 2014 under pressure from activist investors. PayPal, acquired in 2002 and for a time the faster-growing part of the business, was spun off as an independent company in 2015. StubHub was sold in 2020, the classified advertising businesses in 2020 and 2021, and the South Korean operation in 2021, leaving eBay as a marketplace business concentrated on categories where its inventory of used, rare and collectable goods cannot easily be replicated.

History

AuctionWeb and the first years, 1995 to 1999

eBay began as AuctionWeb, a page on Pierre Omidyar's personal website, launched on 3 September 1995. Omidyar, a French-born Iranian-American programmer, built it as a side project. Its first sale was a broken laser pointer that sold for US$14.83; Omidyar contacted the winning bidder to confirm that he understood the item was broken, and received the reply that the buyer collected broken laser pointers. The story became the company's founding anecdote and, more usefully, the demonstration of its central proposition, which is that for almost any object there exists somewhere a person who wants it, and that the difficulty has always been finding them.

In February 1996 Omidyar's internet service provider required him to move to a business account, raising his monthly cost from US$30 to US$250. The site earned US$1,000 in its first month and US$2,500 in its second, more than covering the increase, and he began charging listing fees. Chris Agarpao was hired as the first employee to process cheques arriving in the post. Jeffrey Skoll became the first president in early 1996.

In November 1996 the company partnered with Electronic Travel Auctions to sell airline seats, hotel rooms and cruise berths, by which point it had hosted more than 200,000 auctions in fourteen months. The service was renamed eBay in September 1997 after Omidyar's consulting firm, Echo Bay Technology Group; the echobay.com domain was held by a gold mining company, so he shortened it.

The company received US$6.7 million from Benchmark Capital in 1997, an investment that became one of the most profitable in the history of venture capital. The most traded items were Beanie Babies, the soft toys then subject to a speculative collecting mania, which accounted for about 10 per cent of all listings in 1997. The manufacturer, Ty, operated a trading page of its own but provided no way to sort listings, and collectors moved to eBay. Omidyar noted the company's dependence on the continued strength of the Beanie Babies market in the risk factors of its 1998 annual report, a disclosure that reads in retrospect as an accurate description of how narrow the early business was.

Meg Whitman was appointed president and chief executive in March 1998, when the company had 30 employees, 500,000 users and American revenue of US$4.7 million. In July 1998 it acquired Jump, operator of the advertising-supported auction site Up4Sale. In September 1998, during the dot-com boom, eBay listed on the Nasdaq at US$18 a share, closing its first day at US$53 and reaching a market value of nearly US$1.9 billion.

Expansion and acquisition, 2000 to 2007

eBay bought Half.com for US$312 million in stock in June 2000 and partnered with Escrow.com to handle escrow for vehicle transactions. By the end of that year it had 22.5 million registered users and 79.4 million auctions a quarter.

International expansion proceeded by acquisition. It took a majority stake in Internet Auction Co., the largest auction site in South Korea, in January 2001, and bought the French site iBazar for about US$112 million in stock in February 2002. It entered China in 2002, left Japan the same year in the face of competition from Yahoo! Japan, and began operating in Taiwan through the US$9.5 million purchase of NeoCom Technology, turning the Taiwanese operation over to a joint venture partner in June 2006.

The most consequential acquisition of the period was PayPal, bought on 3 October 2002 for US$1.4 billion. PayPal had grown on the back of eBay transactions, solving the problem of how strangers could pay one another online, and eBay had been competing with it through its own Billpoint service, which it retired in January 2003. Within a decade PayPal was growing faster than the marketplace and generating a larger share of the company's value.

Classified advertising and adjacent services followed. In August 2004 eBay bought 25 per cent of Craigslist from a former executive for US$32 million, and in December 2004 it acquired Rent.com for US$415 million. It launched the classified site Kijiji internationally in March 2005 and in the United States in July 2007, and bought Gumtree in the United Kingdom in May 2005. In October 2005 it acquired Skype for US$2.6 billion, on the theory that buyers and sellers would want to speak to one another. In January 2007 it bought StubHub, the ticket resale marketplace, for US$310 million. ProStores, a website and e-commerce toolkit for small merchants, was acquired and rebranded in 2005 and closed in 2015. eBay Express, a fixed-price shopping site launched in April 2006 with ten million listings, was shut down in October 2008.

China

eBay's failure in China has become a standard case study. It acquired EachNet, the leading Chinese auction site, in 2003 and held about 85 per cent of the market. Within four years Alibaba's Taobao had reduced that share to 7.7 per cent, and eBay closed its Chinese site in 2007, transferring operations to a joint venture with Tom Online in which it contributed US$40 million for 49 per cent while Tom Online contributed US$20 million for 51 per cent and management control.

The reasons are instructive. eBay charged listing and platform fees while Taobao was free, which mattered a great deal to small Chinese sellers. It migrated the Chinese technology platform onto its global systems, which made the site slow and prone to failure and destroyed user trust. Taobao offered integrated instant messaging, and Chinese buyers wanted to negotiate directly with sellers and build a relationship before purchasing, which eBay's model did not accommodate. Chinese consumers also preferred fixed prices to auctions. Underlying all of this was a decision to apply a global template rather than adapt to local behaviour, and to replace the local systems EachNet had built with international ones that responded more slowly to the market. The company characterised its withdrawal as an evolution of strategy rather than a failure.

Legal matters of the period

In eBay Inc. v. MercExchange, L.L.C., a Virginia jury found on 28 May 2003 that eBay had wilfully infringed three patents, one covering its Buy It Now feature, and awarded US$35 million. The Federal Circuit affirmed the finding and granted a permanent injunction. On 15 May 2006 the Supreme Court of the United States held that an injunction is neither automatic nor required in patent cases where infringement has been established, requiring courts instead to apply the traditional four-factor equitable test. The decision substantially altered American patent litigation, reducing the leverage available to non-practising entities that had relied on the threat of shutting down a defendant's business.

Donahoe, restructuring and the PayPal separation, 2008 to 2015

Meg Whitman resigned in January 2008 to enter politics and was succeeded by John Donahoe. Under Donahoe the company moved decisively away from auctions toward fixed-price listings by professional sellers, changed its search algorithm and fee structure to favour them, and alienated a substantial portion of the small sellers who had built the site. The reasoning was that auctions suited scarce and collectable goods but that most commerce is the purchase of a known item at a known price, and that eBay would lose to Amazon if it did not compete there. Critics argued that in pursuing Amazon's market the company weakened its advantage in the one Amazon could not serve.

In April 2008 eBay sued Craigslist, alleging that actions taken in January 2008 had unfairly diluted its economic interest by more than 10 per cent and cost it a board seat. Craigslist countersued, alleging that eBay had used its board position to obtain confidential information for use by its competing Kijiji service. In September 2010 the Delaware judge William B. Chandler III held that the Craigslist founders Jim Buckmaster and Craig Newmark had breached their fiduciary duty of loyalty and restored eBay's stake from 24.85 per cent to 28.4 per cent, while dismissing eBay's objection to a staggered board on the ground that Craigslist was entitled to protect its trade secrets. eBay sold the stake back to Craigslist in June 2015, ending the dispute.

In May 2008 the company opened the first building it had constructed in its thirteen-year existence, on its North Campus in San Jose, with 3,248 solar panels covering 60,000 square feet and supplying 650 kilowatts, between 15 and 18 per cent of its energy requirement at the time.

Skype was never successfully integrated with the marketplace, and in November 2009 eBay sold 70 per cent of it to a consortium led by Silver Lake Partners and Marc Andreessen at a US$2.75 billion valuation, retaining 30 per cent. Microsoft bought the whole company for US$8.5 billion in May 2011, so that eBay's retained minority produced a substantial return on an acquisition generally regarded as a mistake.

In April 2009 eBay agreed to acquire control of the South Korean retailer G-Market for US$413 million. In June 2011 it bought GSI Commerce for US$2.4 billion, renaming it eBay Enterprise in 2013, and sold Rent.com to Primedia in May 2012 for about US$415 million. In October 2012 it established international shipping through a partnership with Pitney Bowes, under which a seller sends an item to a domestic facility that handles export formalities and onward delivery, removing the principal obstacle to cross-border selling by individuals, and agreed discounted domestic shipping with FedEx.

In November 2012 eBay was among the defendants in the High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation, in which the Department of Justice alleged agreements among technology companies not to solicit one another's skilled employees. The matter settled in May 2014 with eBay required to end the practice.

On 30 September 2014 the company announced that it would separate PayPal into an independent public company, a step Carl Icahn had demanded nine months earlier. The separation completed on 18 July 2015. It reflected the judgement that PayPal's growth was constrained by association with a marketplace whose competitors were reluctant to use a rival's payment system, and within a few years PayPal's market value exceeded eBay's several times over.

Wenig, activism and divestment, 2015 to 2020

Devin Wenig became chief executive on the separation of PayPal. The period was marked by the disposal of businesses assembled over the previous fifteen years and by pressure from activist shareholders who argued that the company was a collection of unrelated assets trading below the sum of its parts.

In January 2015 eBay bought the Mexican classified site Vivanuncios. In August 2015 it sold part of its stake in the Indian retailer Snapdeal, and in September it removed ProPay and Skrill as payment methods for low usage. In July 2017 it entered a partnership with Flipkart, taking a 5.44 per cent stake in exchange for its Indian business, valued at US$211 million, and a US$514 million cash investment, recording a gain of US$167 million; it sold the stake to Walmart in May 2018 and relaunched its own Indian operations. Half.com closed in August 2017. In October 2017 the company introduced image search, allowing a user to photograph an object and find matching listings, an early consumer application of machine vision at scale.

On 31 January 2018 eBay announced that it would replace PayPal as its principal payments provider with the Dutch company Adyen, giving it direct control of the payment flow and the associated data and economics. The migration to managed payments ran from 2018 to 2021 and was among the most significant operational changes in the company's history, converting payments from a service provided by a former subsidiary into a source of revenue and of information about transactions. In May 2018 it bought the Japanese platform Qoo10 for US$573 million, and in July it added support for Apple Pay and a partnership with Square offering sellers loans of up to US$100,000.

In March 2019 the company paid its first dividend, under pressure from investors seeking returns rather than reinvestment. In September 2019, facing a campaign by Elliott Investment Management and Starboard Value, Devin Wenig resigned; Scott Schenkel, chief financial officer since 2015, served as interim chief executive. In November 2019 eBay agreed to sell StubHub to Viagogo for US$4.05 billion in cash, completing in February 2020 at what proved to be favourable timing, since the pandemic closed live events within weeks.

Iannone and the focus categories, 2020 to 2026

Jamie Iannone, previously chief operating officer of Walmart's e-commerce business and earlier a long-serving eBay executive, became chief executive in April 2020. The strategy he adopted, described internally as focus categories, concentrated investment on parts of the marketplace where eBay's inventory of used, rare, refurbished and collectable goods gives it an advantage no general retailer can match: trading cards, sneakers, luxury watches and handbags, motor parts and accessories, refurbished electronics and collectables. In each the company built authentication services, structured product data and specialist tools, on the reasoning that a buyer spending thousands of dollars on a watch needs assurance that a general marketplace cannot provide.

The Authenticity Guarantee began with luxury sneakers in 2020 and extended to watches, handbags, jewellery, trading cards and apparel. Items above a price threshold are shipped to an eBay authentication centre, inspected by specialists and forwarded to the buyer with a certificate, a service that inserts the company into the physical supply chain it had spent twenty-five years avoiding.

Divestment continued. In July 2020 eBay sold its classified advertising businesses to Adevinta for US$2.5 billion in cash and 540 million Adevinta shares, divesting Gumtree separately to obtain regulatory approval, and sold the Adevinta shares in 2023 when that company was bought by private equity. In November 2021 it sold its South Korean business to Emart for US$3 billion. Pierre Omidyar left the board in September 2020, having stepped down as chairman in 2015.

Acquisitions turned toward the focus categories and toward technology. eBay took a stake in Funko in May 2022 and became its preferred secondary marketplace; bought the non-fungible token marketplace KnownOrigin in June 2022, at the peak of interest in that market; acquired the myFitment group of automotive and powersports parts businesses in August 2022; and bought TCGplayer, the largest marketplace for collectable card games, for about US$295 million in October 2022. It acquired 3PM Shield, which uses machine learning to identify fraudulent listings and sellers, in February 2023, and Certilogo, a provider of digital identity and authentication for apparel, in July 2023. In January 2025 it bought Caramel, which handles the financing, insurance and title transfer steps of a private vehicle sale, and in September 2025 Tise, a Norwegian social marketplace for second-hand fashion and homeware in which its venture arm had made its first investment.

eBay Ventures, established in 2022, invests in early-stage marketplace technology companies.

In January 2024 the company announced that it would reduce its workforce by 9 per cent, saying that hiring had outpaced growth, following a smaller reduction of about 500 positions in February 2023.

On 3 May 2026 the video game retailer GameStop, which already held about 5 per cent of eBay through shares and derivatives, proposed to acquire the company for about US$56 billion in cash and stock. eBay rejected the approach outright, describing it as neither credible nor attractive.

Business model

eBay earns revenue from final value fees charged to sellers as a percentage of the sale price, from insertion fees on listings above a monthly allowance, from optional promotional and advertising products that raise a listing's visibility, from payment processing since the move to managed payments, and from services such as authentication and shipping labels.

The take rate, at roughly 14 per cent of gross merchandise volume, is higher than it was a decade ago, principally because payments and advertising revenue now accrue to eBay rather than to PayPal or to nobody. Advertising in particular has become one of the fastest-growing and highest-margin lines, following the pattern established by Amazon, in which a marketplace sells sellers the right to appear above other sellers in results the marketplace controls.

The marketplace's strategic problem has been growth. Gross merchandise volume has been broadly flat or declining for several years, while Amazon, Shopify merchants, Temu, Shein and specialised marketplaces have taken share. Management's response has been to accept a smaller volume of higher-value transactions in defensible categories rather than to compete for commodity retail, and to return cash to shareholders through dividends and buybacks. The result is a business that generates substantial free cash flow while growing slowly, which the equity market has valued accordingly.

The company's structural advantage lies in its inventory of things that are not made any more. A new television is available from many retailers at a similar price; a 1987 baseball card, a discontinued handbag, a part for a twenty-year-old motorcycle or a first edition is available from whoever happens to have one, and eBay is where the largest number of such people are. That inventory is genuinely difficult to replicate, and it is the reason the company has remained substantial through two decades of competition from much larger rivals.

Technology

eBay operates one of the older large-scale e-commerce platforms and has undertaken repeated re-architecting, moving from monolithic systems to service-oriented and then cloud-based infrastructure. Its principal technical problems are search over an inventory in which most items are unique and poorly described by their sellers, fraud detection across hundreds of millions of listings, and pricing guidance derived from completed sales.

Machine learning is applied to structured data extraction from free-text listings, to image recognition for search and for authentication, to ranking, to recommendation, and to risk scoring of transactions. The company offers a public API that allows developers to build applications integrating with the marketplace and to list and manage inventory programmatically, which supports a substantial ecosystem of third-party seller tools.

Philanthropy and charity auctions

eBay for Charity allows sellers to direct a portion of proceeds to a nominated charity and discounts fees on charity listings. More than US$192 million was reported raised through the programme in 2024.

The best-known charity listings have been the annual auctions of a lunch with Warren Buffett for eight people at the Smith and Wollensky restaurant in New York, held in 21 years between 2000 and 2022 with none in 2020 and 2021 because of the pandemic. They raised US$53.2 million in total for the Glide Foundation in San Francisco, with winning bids ranging from US$2 million to US$19 million for the final auction in 2022. A comparable auction for lunch with Marc Benioff of Salesforce in May 2024 raised US$200,000 together with a further donation of US$1.5 million to the same charity.

A letter sent to Mark P. Mays of Clear Channel Communications by Senator Harry Reid and forty other Democratic senators complaining about remarks by the broadcaster Rush Limbaugh sold for US$2,100,100 for the Marine Corps Law Enforcement Foundation, which funds the education of children of service personnel who have died; Limbaugh matched the winning bid.

The Up and Running Grants programme, launched in 2020, provides 50 small business owners a year with US$10,000 grants.

The cyberstalking scandal

In June 2020 five employees, including executives, were dismissed and charged with cyberstalking after a campaign directed at Ina and David Steiner, the editors and publishers of EcommerceBytes, a newsletter covering the industry that senior eBay staff regarded as hostile. Seven people were eventually charged.

The conduct was extreme. In addition to anonymous threatening messages and the publication of the couple's address, the defendants arranged deliveries to their home in Natick, Massachusetts, including a preserved fetal pig, a bloody pig mask, a funeral wreath, a book on surviving the loss of a spouse and pornography sent in the neighbours' names. They travelled to Natick intending to place a GPS tracker on the couple's car and vandalised their property, and then offered to help the victims find the harassers in order to ingratiate the company with them.

All the defendants pleaded guilty and most received prison sentences, with the former senior director of safety and security receiving the longest term. Investigators found that Devin Wenig, chief executive at the time and himself frequently criticised in the newsletter, had no knowledge of the harassment and he was not charged; he had left the company in September 2019 with a severance package reported at US$57 million. Steve Wymer, the chief communications officer, was dismissed for cause over alleged involvement but was not charged.

eBay paid a US$3 million criminal penalty in 2021, the statutory maximum, and settled the Steiners' civil suit in 2025 for an undisclosed sum reported to be substantial. The case is among the most serious instances of corporate misconduct directed at journalists in the United States and prompted broad reassessment of how companies monitor and respond to critics.

Criticism and controversies

Fraud

The marketplace's openness has made it a persistent venue for fraud in both directions. Seller frauds have included the sale of counterfeit goods and bootleg recordings; shill bidding, in which a seller or a confederate bids to inflate a price; taking payment without shipping; shipping items other than those described or deliberately faulty ones; misleading descriptions and photographs; refusing agreed returns of defective goods; fencing stolen property; listing goods that cannot exist, such as batteries of impossible capacity for their stated size; and misrepresenting shipping costs, including quoting bulk rates while charging much higher individual return shipping.

Buyer frauds have included false claims of shipping damage, claiming non-delivery of goods received, returning a different item from the one bought, removing parts before returning an item, forging payment confirmation emails, and package redirection schemes in which a return is filled with rubbish and sent to a wrong address. Bidders have also used pseudonymous accounts to place high bids they do not intend to honour, either to obtain a second chance offer at a lower price or to disrupt a competitor's sale.

eBay has been criticised for insufficient action against shill bidding in particular, and users developed practices such as auction sniping, placing a bid in the final seconds, partly to limit exposure to it. The company's buyer protection policies, which generally resolve disputes in the buyer's favour, have in turn been criticised by sellers as creating an incentive for buyer fraud that the platform does not adequately police.

Counterfeit goods

In 2004 Tiffany & Co. sued eBay, alleging that more than 70 per cent of the Tiffany silver jewellery offered on the site was counterfeit and that eBay profited from infringement of its trademark. On 14 July 2008 a federal district judge held that eBay had no legal duty to monitor its users for counterfeit sales, a ruling affirmed by the Second Circuit in Tiffany (NJ) Inc. v. eBay Inc. in 2010. The decision established in American law that a marketplace is not liable for its users' infringement where it acts on specific notices, the principle on which every large platform's counterfeiting policy has since been built.

European courts reached different conclusions. In June 2008 a Paris court awarded LVMH €40 million over auctions of counterfeit bags and perfumes and over sales of genuine perfumes by unauthorised retailers, and granted a permanent injunction against eBay auctions of LVMH perfumes whether counterfeit or not; eBay banned the items. In the same month a court at Troyes ordered eBay to pay Hermès €20,000 over two counterfeit bags sold in 2006 and to display the ruling on the home page of its French site for three months. The divergence reflects a genuine difference of legal philosophy about whether an intermediary that profits from transactions should bear responsibility for policing them.

Illegal items

In September 2023 the United States Department of Justice sued eBay for permitting the sale of devices that defeat vehicle emissions controls, restricted-use pesticides and paint removers containing methylene chloride, alleging violations of the Clean Air Act and other environmental statutes. The court dismissed the case, holding that section 230 of the Communications Decency Act shielded the company from liability for listings created by its users.

The company has also restricted categories under external pressure. In 2021 it complied with a request from the estate of Dr. Seuss to prohibit the resale of six books the estate had withdrawn over racially insensitive illustrations. The restriction produced a backlash among conservative commentators and a sharp increase in interest in the withdrawn titles.

Other criticism

eBay has been criticised over changes to its fee structure and search ranking that favour large professional sellers over individuals, over the difficulty of reaching human support, and over the handling of seller funds during the transition to managed payments. In 2020 security researchers found that the eBay website ran port scans of visitors' own computers using scripts intended to detect remote access software associated with fraud, a practice defended by the company as anti-fraud protection and criticised as an unconsented intrusion into a visitor's machine.

Corporate affairs

Leadership

eBay has had five permanent chief executives. Pierre Omidyar founded the company and served as chairman until 2015, remaining on the board until September 2020; he has since devoted most of his attention to the Omidyar Network and to philanthropy, including substantial funding of investigative journalism. Meg Whitman led the company from 1998 to 2008, taking it from 30 employees to a business with billions in revenue, and afterwards ran for governor of California and led Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Quibi before serving as United States ambassador to Kenya. John Donahoe served from 2008 to 2015 and subsequently led ServiceNow and Nike. Devin Wenig served from 2015 to 2019. Jamie Iannone has led the company since April 2020.

Jeffrey Skoll, the first president, used the proceeds of his shareholding to found Participant Media and the Skoll Foundation, and Omidyar and Skoll between them made the company an unusually large source of philanthropic capital relative to its size.

Employees and offices

The company employs roughly 11,000 people, a figure reduced by successive divestments and by the redundancies announced in 2023 and 2024. Its headquarters remain in San Jose, with substantial operations in Salt Lake City, Austin, Berlin, Dublin, Shanghai and Bengaluru. In September 2018, following the shooting at YouTube's headquarters, it announced that it would install a security fence around the perimeter of its San Jose campus.

eBay Motors and vehicles

Vehicles and parts have been among eBay's largest categories almost from the beginning, and eBay Motors operates as a distinct destination with its own tools, financing and inspection services. The category suits the marketplace unusually well: parts for older vehicles are rarely stocked by retailers, fitment data determines whether a part will work on a given model, and the company has built a compatibility database covering hundreds of millions of part and vehicle combinations. The acquisitions of the myFitment group in 2022 and of Caramel in 2025 extended the capability into specialist selling tools and into the paperwork of private vehicle sales.

Whole vehicles have been sold through the site since 2000, and the escrow arrangement established with Escrow.com that year addressed the obvious difficulty of transacting at that value between strangers. Motor parts and accessories remain one of the focus categories under the current strategy.

Recommerce and sustainability

eBay has increasingly presented itself as a recommerce company, meaning a platform for the resale of goods that already exist, and has argued that this is inherently the lowest-impact form of commerce because it displaces the manufacture of new items. The company publishes estimates of avoided emissions from pre-owned purchases and has expanded refurbished programmes in electronics and appliances, in which certified sellers and manufacturers offer restored products with warranties.

The claim has force but also limits. Resale genuinely extends product lifetimes and the growth of second-hand markets in clothing, electronics and furniture has been among the clearer consumer shifts of the period. Against this, shipping individual items to individual buyers consumes packaging and transport that a local sale would not, and critics note that a marketplace's interest is in the volume of transactions rather than in the durability of goods.

The company has committed to renewable electricity for its operations and to reductions in packaging, and its own direct footprint is modest, since it operates data centres and offices rather than warehouses and delivery fleets. The great majority of the environmental effect associated with its activity is generated by sellers and carriers it does not control.

Competition

eBay competes with Amazon, which serves the general retail market at far greater scale; with Walmart and other retailers operating their own marketplaces; with Shopify, which enables merchants to sell directly rather than through any marketplace; with Temu and Shein, which have taken large volumes of low-priced goods; and with category specialists including Etsy in handmade and vintage goods, Poshmark and Vinted in second-hand clothing, StockX and GOAT in sneakers, Chrono24 in watches, and Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist in local sales, where the absence of shipping and fees is decisive for bulky or low-value items.

Its position against each is different. It cannot match Amazon on delivery speed or on new goods, and has stopped trying. Against the second-hand specialists it competes on breadth, since a single account reaches buyers across every category, and on the authentication services that have eroded the specialists' principal advantage. Against local classifieds it competes on reach, since an unusual item may have no buyer within driving distance but several in the country.

The long-run question for the business is whether a general marketplace for used and rare goods retains an advantage as category specialists mature, or whether it is progressively disassembled by them. The focus category strategy is a direct answer to that question, on the argument that eBay can be the specialist in enough categories at once to keep the whole worth more than the parts.