eBay Q1 2025 Pre-Earnings Commentary & Highlights
eBay is set to report Q1 2025 earnings April 30 at 5:30 PM Eastern. Take a look back at highlights from Q1 and what's happening so far in Q2 2025!
Leadership Changes & Corporate News
eBay announced and closed their first acquisition of 2025, buying auto auction site Caramel to streamline and simplify the vehicle buying experience.
Liz Morton
Business development leaders continue to leave eBay to take on roles at overseas rivals Tik Tok and Temu, while Walmart's talent recruiting strategy poaching key personnel from eBay to bolster its initiatives to compete in crucial high value categories has expanded to include Motors Parts and Accessories.
Liz Morton
eBay is looking for a new VP International Markets as David Ramadge has left after a total of 12 years at the company and they've finally named a new Head of Financial and Crisis Communications with internal promotion of Maddy Martinez, who previously handled comms and corporate affairs at beleaguered subsidiary TCGPlayer.
Liz Morton
Labor relations troubles continue as TCGUnion-CWA workers fight for a fair contract, employee rights firm Don Bivens investigates potential 401(K) benefit violations, allegations of discrimination and retaliation surface both in the US and Ireland, and sneaker authenticators file class action alleging Fair Labor Standards Act and New York Labor Law violations.
Liz Morton
The Department of Justice has decided to drop their appeal of Section 230 dismissal in EPA case which sought to hold eBay liable for illegal items sold on their site.
Meanwhile, the next steps in the potential ~$500M eBay cyberstalking scandal lawsuit hang on ex-Security Director Jim Baugh's testimony and alleged CIA background with new details in the case raising serious questions about historic and ongoing corporate governance, compliance, disclosure and ethics failures at the company.
Liz Morton
And of course the big topic on everyone's mind - what will be the impact of looming tariff and de minimis exemption changes on China cross border trade?
Liz Morton
Promoted Listings Ads & Growth Hacking Discounts
eBay made multiple stealth changes to Promoted Listings ad rate requirements in Q4 2024 as well as major changes to ad attribution in Germany in Q1 2025 that exponentially expanded the number of sales which will collect ad fees.
Liz Morton
Those changes may have spooked sellers and slowed ad adoption rates, forcing eBay to crank up ad discounts in Q1 while new listing form insights show 60-70%+ ad usage saturation has already been reached in some categories.
Liz Morton
But the discounts don't stop there - in both Q1 and Q2, eBay has increasingly turned to legacy discounting tricks in an effort to goose GMV and Active and Enthusiast Buyer stats.
Liz Morton
UK C2C Transformation: Buyer Fees, Private Seller Payment Changes, and Simple Delivery Managed Shipping
eBay was set to introduce Buyer Fees in the UK on February 4th as part of their plan to remonetize purchases after dropping private seller fees in October, but a last minute change to a phased roll out wasn't enough to prevent an embarrassing failure to launch from creating chaos on the platform.
Liz Morton
Once the buyer fees did start to roll out, confusion continued as the math didn't quite add up and fee-averse buyers immediately began sharing clever workarounds to try to avoid paying higher fee-inclusive prices.
Private seller pushback against payment policy changes has also been fierce, as eBay is now holding their payouts until after delivery confirmation - a move that also appears to be being deployed on a much more limited basis in the US.
eBay's launch of mandatory use of Simple Delivery managed shipping for UK private sellers is causing confusion and chaos as post offices initially refused to accept some packages, sellers question whether they will really be protected for loss and damage in transit, and eBay exempts items under £10 in some sub-categories.
Liz Morton
AI Updates, Focus Categories & Other Initiatives
eBay has finally rolled out Magical AI Listing to all private or personal accounts in the US, UK & Germany after year and half delay - but in my initial testing, the new tool completely failed to identify items from an image and offered no significant advantages over the regular manual listing process.
Liz Morton
eBay is leveraging OpenAI's new agent Operator offering to act as a virtual assistant capable of autonomously performing tasks across the internet, including online shopping, and directs users to eBay for unique inventory finds - is it really an innovative tech breakthrough or just more AI hype?
Liz Morton
Users are finally starting to see eBay Facebook Marketplace partnership listings in the wild but erroneous item details added by eBay AI description summaries raise serious questions about liability for false advertising and seller protection for Item Not As Described claims.
Liz Morton
The Top Star sneaker buyer loyalty program is quietly ending amidst broader strategy shift.
eBay has opened a new sneaker authentication center in Louisville, KY expanding labor-centric warehouse operations to lower cost of living/lower wage, right to work state amidst increasing employee relations challenges.
Liz Morton
A recent update to eBay's Privacy Policies hints at new Blockchain technology and AI integrations possible coming soon and sellers in Australia now have access to AI Responses for Messages, using eBay.AI to automatically respond to buyer questions using information already available in listing and order details.
Liz Morton
Longtime eBay mega-seller Rick Probstein is launching BYD, a live selling platform aimed directly at competing with eBay Live, Whatnot, Fanatics Collect and more as livestream competition heats up.
Liz Morton
eBay has introduced a new Ambassador program giving buyers, sellers, and content creators opportunity to earn affiliate commissions.
Liz Morton
And eBay's January 2025 Seller Update revealed Final Value Fees would be increasing across most categories on the platform, effective February 14th.
Tests & Technical Issues
eBay is testing moving category navigation breadcrumbs to the bottom of the item page, forcing users to scroll past hundreds of Promoted Listings ads to see critical item information.
Liz Morton
Auction buyers have expressed frustration as A/B testing of changes to bid increments for lower priced items forces some to pay higher prices than others.
Liz Morton
And eBay continues to be plagued with near daily business impacting technical issues including missing email notifications for sales and messages; Listing Template, App Crashing, Buy It Now, Add to Cart, Offer & Watchlist problems; broken search and sorting options; and an embarrassing annually recurring missing listings glitch that shows after almost 30 years in business, eBay still hasn't figured how to handle the fact that February is a short month.
Liz Morton
That's it for the eBay Q1 2025 pre-earnings highlights - catch up on commentary from Q4 2024 earnings and stay tuned for more coverage after the call from Value Added Resource!
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