Ebay Inc (EBAY) September 8, 2026 Conference Transcript

In the interest of time, I think we're going to get going. Our next fireside chat is with eBay. We have two speakers, Jamie Iannone, CEO, Peggy Alford, CFO. Jamie and Peggy, thanks so much for being part of the conference this year.

Thanks for having us, Eric.

Okay, so I'm going to do my legal duty first and read the safe harbor. This discussion is publicly available via webcast through the investor relations section of the eBay website at investors.ebayinc.com, where you will also find additional disclaimers. This is the once a year I dust off my old law exam. by the law degree. So, Jamie, let's start with you. I wanted to go back before we go forward. It's been several years now that you've been in the CEO role at eBay. As you look back at that journey, what changed the most about the business over the last couple of years?

Yeah, look, I feel like the business is performing really well. We just had, you know, great Q2 earnings. And I think, you know, the biggest thing is probably the clarity of focus that we have. You know, we're very focused on, you know, 70% of our business now is either focus categories, C2C, or e-commerce, which is the areas where we're really leaning in. Each one of those individually and collectively grew 20% in Q2, so we see real strength there. We've been complementing that with a real kind of foundational layer, leveraging things like AI, trust, and shipping. Each of those has been game changers for us over the last couple of years, and I'm sure we could talk more about that. And I think the third thing is probably just the new growth vectors. You know, C2C has been a great growth vector for us, but we also have great new growth vectors in eBay Live and in vehicles. You know, Live continues to have strong growth and be really complementary to our core business. And vehicles, while new, has now, you know, quickly reached hundreds of millions of dollars of run rate on the business. We just sold a $5 million Porsche, and it's like this phenomenal end-to-end customer experience. So for any of you collector car people out there, you've got to go check out what's happening in vehicles. But overall, what I feel great about is just this clarity of focus, the broad-based nature of the growth that we're seeing, and how each of those elements contribute to each other.

Maybe sticking with the consumer, we kicked off the conference this morning with a talk with our global economist who talked about the consumer relative to the macro backdrop. You guys have a range of exposure to the consumer, from value-seeking shoppers all the way to discretionary enthusiasts. How would you characterize the consumer behavior you're seeing on your platform today?

You want to take that one? Sure, yeah. You know, we continue to see an environment where the U.S. consumer has been more resilient than outside of the U.S., But in coming back to the business a year and a half ago, one of the things that was so exciting is the fact that we tend to thrive in environments when, you know, the economy is doing really well as well as in times when it's tougher. And that's because of the diversity of our platform where you've got, you know, enthusiast buyers that are buying in their areas of, you know, areas that they're really excited about, discretionary purchases, things like that. But at the same time, value seekers, you know, in areas like re-commerce, these are areas where, you know, you can get a real value for your dollar. And so we tend to appeal to the consumer that's looking for a deal as well. And so we've really focused on making sure that we're just building out the value prop, as Jamie described, in areas where we're building trust through authenticity guarantee, you know, fitment in vehicles and parts, and then combined with sort of the consumer that is excited to have to get a deal but also find that item that they've been, you know, uniquely looking for, you know, enables us to really thrive in periods of time. you know, sort of the division between U.S. resilient consumer and challenging macro times outside of the U.S.

Okay. Thank you for that, Peggy. Maybe building on Peggy's answer, you know, Jamie, coming back to you, how do you think about continuing to position eBay against the competitive landscape more broadly? You've talked a little bit about products. You've talked a little bit about giving different value propositions to consumers. How do you think about platform differentiation against the landscape.

I think we've built a series of capabilities and assets that's difficult to replicate. When you think about eBay, we have 2.6 billion listings. We have 136 million buyers. We have 30 years of marketplace history and data. We have a whole set of trust and enablement capabilities that we've built. A lot of that is really unique. When you percent of that is what we call non-new and seasoned. So really kind of unmatched inventory from what's generally available on the web. Seventy percent of it is in our key areas of focus categories, which is a huge business for us. That's over 40 percent of our inventory. Last quarter grew 26 percent, and these are the categories we've been really focused on driving innovation in. And then re-commerce and C2C, that group collectively makes up about 70 percent of our GMB. And it's where we're strategically heavily focused and aligned. I think the other thing is that, you know, speaking of things like C2C, we've seen really nice growth rates across the marketplaces that we've had. So whether it's UK or Germany or US, we just made some changes in our Australian market to C2C. And we're seeing growth in every single one of those geographies, healthy growth. We're talking 20% plus growth. And that's really, you know, great inventory for eBay because when we get a buyer to become a seller, they become more effective even as a buyer. So that's been important for us. So I think the combination of all those, and then the last is that the horizontal investments that we've been able to make really complement what we're doing in focus categories. So when you look at authenticity and trust as an example, we've launched specific things like authenticity guarantee and watches, sneakers, handbags, et cetera, but we've launched Guaranteed Fit in our motors, parts, and accessories business. In the vehicles business that I just talked about, we do everything, financing, delivery, title transfer, et cetera. And so that's the other kind of thing that really enables us to compete, Eric, is that real end-to-end high-quality value proposition that we've put together. Okay.

That's super clear. Sticking with the topic of focus categories, I don't know which one of you would like to take this, but I would love to go a little bit deeper in where you're seeing the greatest operating momentum in focus categories today, and which verticals within focus categories are you most excited about that could generate share gains in the years Yeah, I think the thing that's so exciting about focus categories is that the strength has been so broad-based.

You know, I think what's been obvious is how strong collectibles has been, but even within collectibles, trading cards has been especially strong, but also other areas outside of trading cards, you know, like toys and coins. And then within trading cards, it's not just Pokemon. It's also the other collectible card games. It's all three of the sports. And I think if you look at the investment we've made in that value prop, both, you know, whether it's, you know, sort of using our entire framework, the build by partner framework, where we built a lot of capabilities around trading card, you know, capabilities on both trust as well as removing friction. And then we acquired TCD player. We partnered with PSA. It's sort of, you know, applying our playbook where, you know, to a market that has an increasing TAM, like trading card does, we're actually creating a differentiated value prop across the category that's really enabled us to capture that capability. And then, you know, we have new growth vectors in addition to our existing focus categories like vehicles and live, live which continues to accelerate our collectibles category but also is a new medium that is growing in TAM that enables us to capture new sellers and new buyers that are, you know, transacting on our platform. And so all of these, this growth is happening in a very diversified manner across the platform, which gives us a lot of confidence that that growth is durable.

Okay, understood. Jamie, even though we're on day one of this conference, I will tell you there's already been a lot of talk about agentic commerce. When you think about agentic commerce more broadly, how do you think about the evolution of eBay towards being more conversational and agent-driven as the landscape evolves?

Yeah, look, AI has been a real structural tailwind for our business. First, the strong growth rates we're putting up today are in part because of all of the AI innovation that we've been driving. You think about a product like Magical Listings, it really kind of makes it so simple to list any product that we're unlocking so much inventory that's sitting in people's houses and closets and garages. What we see, for example, in our U.S. market is we see 50% more listings per lister because of this new AI technology, and as a result, we have a much higher customer lifetime value for new sellers joining the platform. We're seeing the same type of results and better engagement and natural language search that we have on the platform and in new AI-based tools that we're building. We build a card scanning technology for figuring out the pricing of trading cards. And eBay has the best pricing data that's out there. We have 30 years of history. And now it's incredibly easy to use. We've seen over 80 million scans. We get about a half a million scans every single day. an example of AI making our platform better. The second thing is that, you know, we've been able to, you know, with our unique inventory, even though it's small, you know, when our unique inventory is out there in agentic commerce, it does bring us new buyers. And what we find is that, you know, about half the time, they come back to eBay directly to drive their next purchase. So that's really great. And the third thing is it turns out that this trust and enablement layer that we've been building over the last, you know, five, six years, has become increasingly important, especially in the world of AI, the fact that you know that this product is guaranteed to fit your vehicle, that we're authenticating that Birkin bag that you have, that we have easy and free returns, et cetera. That whole layer is, I think, really helpful for us in an agentic world as well, and that's what we're seeing from consumers. So overall, we're excited by the innovation that's happening. I'm excited about what AI is doing across our business, from marketing, search, to listing products, et cetera, and it's a big part of why we're seeing strong growth rates right now is the AI innovation that we're driving on eBay. Okay, understood.

You mentioned earlier Live. Over the last year, what have you learned about Live on your platform and what it does in terms of buyer and seller behavior and transactional dynamics?

Yeah, so we just had another record quarter in eBay Live. It grew 8x year-on-year last quarter. And what we're seeing is that it drives really like content, commerce, community, and entertainment. all happening at once on eBay Live. And it's really great for our sellers on the platform because they're able to have a whole new format to sell to buyers. And what we see from sellers is that sellers, when they start doing a live, 90% of them stay on and keep going. And what we see is they have three times higher growth rates than comparable sellers who are not using eBay Live. And you think about it, it makes sense, right? You have this new engagement tool, you're engaging buyers, you're building new trust with buyers by communicating via this live channel. And so you help grow your core business on eBay as a result. The other thing that we're seeing is that it really helps drive buyer engagement. So take a buyer in collectibles, when they start watching eBay live, they end up buying 70% more than comparable buyers. And a big part of that is actually on the core business. And in some cases, people are actually being introduced to whole new hobbies by watching eBay Live. So they may, you know, get involved in comic books. Or Peggy was telling me she'd never bought a luxury watch before. Oh, I don't know who that is. Peggy told me she had never bought a luxury watch before, but she started watching a bunch of lives, and all of a sudden, you know, she understood kind of what watch lives were. And so, you know, the opportunity for, like, to build the marketplace between sellers and buyers to really create kind of a new sense of community. Some of you may not know, I was at eBay from 2001 to 2009 when the site was predominantly very auction-driven and had a lot of community on the platform. And what's exciting to me about live is seeing that same thing happen. So we built things like popcorn bidding in live where the bidding gets extended. The chats are rolling continuously. You know, sellers are doing like one-second giveaways of stuff. People are getting educated on whole new categories of opportunity. So what's really exciting to see is I've always said when you give sellers a new tool, just watch what they'll do with it, and it becomes pretty amazing. And that's what's happening with Live. Our sellers are coming up with really creative ways to engage buyers, leverage their social media channels out there to bring more traffic to eBay. And, you know, we just started launching simulcasting, So now sellers can simulcast on their other kind of social channels. And all of this is driving a really nice flywheel for the core business.

And I'm glad that wasn't my phone because that's a phone call, so it wasn't me. Thank God, because I'd have to apologize. Flywheel. This is a topic you've talked about a lot in the role of CEO, Jamie. Talk to us a little bit about how important it is to continue to drive momentum across buyers turning into sellers and sellers turning into buyers and how that's a potential natural tailwind for the business.

Yeah, it's been a big focus of ours for many years now is really focusing on that C2C and turning buyers into sellers. Historically, eBay had just marketed kind of the buying side of things. But over the last few years, we've been very focused on the C2C value proposition, marketing kind of that value proposition of what we're doing, changing formats and capabilities in different geographies around the world. And the reason is really a couplefold. First is when a buyer becomes a seller, they become two to two and a half times more valuable as a buyer on the platform. So that's great for us. And think about it. We have features like eBay Balance, right, where you go sell a bunch of stuff on the platform. it sits there in your eBay balance. What do you do? You go splurge on something that you really wanted, right? So that's a key opportunity. The second is those C2C sellers usually bring unique inventory to the platform, right? So it's stuff that generally is not available. You know, I sold a Hammond B3 organ on the site. That's not a product that like there's some business selling Hammond B3 organs. You know, I bought a vintage guitar Wii Hero because my son wanted that. That's not a B2C product, right? That's going to come from someone's closet. So it opens up really unique inventory on the platform. And that does help complement our B2C inventory as well, because a lot of those C2C buyers that sell start buying from our B2C inventory. So it really helps grow it overall. So we've been focused. It's why we put a lot of innovation into magical listing. The newest version is truly fantastic. It's built with this vision that we had of if AI already existed, how should you list a product? And so it guides you through the whole process, like, you know, hey, those are great shoes, show me the label. I figured out that they're used, show me the sole. Okay, here's how you should price them. You know, you're done, that's it. And so all the technologies we've made shipping easier in a lot of our geographies we have what's called managed shipping. So historically on eBay you'd have had to buy the label and go through that process yourself. Now we just say we leverage AI, we can figure out what it's going to cost to ship those sneakers. is we'll take care of the whole thing. We've also built technologies that say, we're going to open up the global demand of the world to you, but make it feel like you're selling to your neighbor. So if you had sold those shoes to someone in Poland, we'd say to you, Eric, just ship them to Chicago. We'll take care of the rest. So the duties, the tariffs, all that stuff, that's a product we built called eBay International Shipping. So we've built this whole series of capabilities to really drive this C2C capability in a way. And it's why our C-to-C businesses are growing north of 20% is because of this real focus that we've put on it. And I'll close with where you started. It creates a really nice flywheel between selling and buying and between C-to-C and B-to-C, and that's what we really like about what's happening there.

One last one on this topic, but broadening out the conversation and bringing Peggy back in. Peggy, enthusiast buyers are so important for the platform more broadly. Talk to us a little bit about what an enthusiast buyer looks like today. and what are some of the initiatives as a team you guys are putting in place to continue to grow and evolve enthusiast buyers in the years ahead?

You know, enthusiast buyers have always been a focus for us, like those that are, you know, buying at a high velocity. And, you know, because the majority of our GMV comes from our enthusiast buyers, something like 85% of our GMV is bought by enthusiasts. And so we're, you know, while we really care about, you know, the top of the funnel and getting new active buyers, we're really, you know, doing that in service of getting these buyers to become enthusiast buyers. Enthusiast buyers grew 3% in Q2, but in the U.S., they grew 9%. And what we saw is that the amount that they're buying continues to increase, I think, every quarter over the last several years. The dollar in the last 12 months that an enthusiast buyer has increased. It's $3,600 as of Q2. And so we're really focused on the experiences that are going to enable them to increase their velocity on the site, things that, you know, Jamie mentioned around our, you know, our features around trust, authenticity guarantee, shipping solutions, because we know that these enthusiast buyers not only are going to buy in the category that caused them to become an enthusiast, but also they then buy across the platform, which is, you know, very beneficial given the diversity of what we offer on the platform. And so that's why we've really been focused on driving that velocity and increasing sort of the number of enthusiast buyers that we have on the platform.

Yeah, and since they now represent, you know, they represent about 70% of our GMB on the platform, and they're generally aligned in our strategic areas. So we're 70% of our business is in e-commerce, in C2C, and focus categories. So the combination of those two built a really kind of great competitive mode for us as you think about all the things we're doing to drive that enthusiast behavior. I like to see GMB follows happy customers in CSAT. So as we've grown the CSAT kind of category by category, that's helped drive that GMB for our enthusiast buyers that Peggy talked about, the 3,600. Okay.

Jamie, bringing you back in, you know, there was an evolution of talking about younger buyers about 18 months ago. Then you did the Depop acquisition. Talk a little bit about buy versus build and how your strategy with respect to attracting younger buyers to the platform is changing and evolving.

So Gen Z of millennials is the fastest growing demographic that we have on eBay across the And, you know, we have a lot of things that we've built in the experience to kind of continue to drive that. But we were excited to make the acquisition of Depop because Depop really leans into that Gen Z and millennial demographic, which is our fastest growing demographic. And they built a real mobile kind of social forward experience really that leverages a lot of the kind of focus of that generation on sustainability and re-commerce. They are much more focused, at least than I was at that age, on, you know, buying pre-loved, unlocking stuff in their closet. it. I've heard them say, everything you ever need in this world already exists. You have to just go create it. And what we're doing is opening up all of this inventory, which hasn't been online before, through the combination of the work that we're doing on eBay and the work that we're now doing with Depop. I had a group of about 50 interns join this summer. And I asked my head of recruiting, or my head of interns recruiting, I said, find me four or five of these folks that know a lot about Depop because we had just signed the deal, but we hadn't closed. And, like, 25 people showed up. And to a person, like, oh, my God, we love Depop. Here's how we use it. And it really spoke to kind of attracting this generation that they've done so well. And what we see now is that, you know, we've seen even stronger growth rates than when we've acquired it because of the real kind of opportunity that's creating. And there is so much GMB to be unlocked that isn't yet online that that's our real opportunity with Depop and a big part of why we did the acquisition. Okay, understood. Peggy, just maybe a couple for you.

Let's start with advertising. What's the current state of advertising in terms of the business on the platform today, and how do you think about the evolution of your advertising products in the years ahead?

Yeah, you know, we've been really excited about the strength in advertising. You know, we set a sort of near-term goal of 3%, and we're at 2.8 now. We don't view that as a ceiling because we have a lot of opportunities to continue to grow. I think we're really focused on the penetration of our listings and, you know, increasing that, you know, the adoption of sellers to one of our promoted listing products. We've, you know, used a lot of AI capabilities to really increase the relevance of these advertising products and to make them even more effective because we're really focused on making sure that we're still delivering a strong ROAS. You know, so we're focused as much on the penetration as we are on making sure that it's a quality product. We have a new promoted off-site product, which enables us to give even more surface to this advertising off of the platform. We recently introduced promoted stores as well. And so there's a lot of opportunity for us to continue to grow advertising even faster than GMB in total and do that while still really preserving the experience for both buyers and sellers. Okay.

You both talked about trust and various answers here. Talk a little bit to me about the authenticity guarantee and how trust-based investments continue to grow, sort of scale, and allow the platform to continue to sort of a lot of its growth momentum going forward.

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, Jamie mentioned he's a boomerang. I'm a boomerang as well. Trust has been something that's always been core to the eBay offering, and authenticity guarantee gives us a real opportunity to demonstrate how trust can really be an accelerator, a velocity driver on the platform. You know, it really enables buyers and sellers to have confidence in transacting, So we continue to focus on growing our authenticity guarantee both geographically. An example would be we now authenticate trading cards in Europe. We are authenticating coins in the U.S. We're authenticating fashion in over 100 brands. And so we're really, you know, what we see is that that gives buyers and sellers the trust to use our platform. and it sort of repels folks from deciding that they're going to use the eBay platform in ways to push products that either not only aren't real but also potentially the condition is not the same as described in the listing. And so we're able to offer this authenticity guarantee at scale because we have facilities where we have specialists that are able to take a lot of product and continue to put more and more volume through either by expanding categories or expanding geographically and do it in a way that also enables us then to get the product to the end buyer in a fast way.

Peggy, sticking with you, maybe turning to capital allocation, you guys obviously just did the Depop deal. Talk to us a little bit about the evolution of your capital allocation strategy What do you think of the balance sheet today, the free cash flow generation? The business throws off a lot of free cash flow. And how do you think about the priorities going forward post-DEPOP closing for allocating capital more broadly?

You know, we continue to take a very balanced approach to capital allocation. Obviously, we are focused on the many opportunities we have in the business to drive top-line growth. You mentioned we have healthy margins, and so the more top-line growth that we can drive, drive the more ultimate flow through to OI and EPS. We have taken opportunity in the recent quarters where we over-deliver on the top line and are able to invest in our strategic priority areas, areas like vehicles and live and C2C, and, you know, really be able to continue those healthy top-line growth numbers that you're seeing while also being able to continue to grow OI and EPS. And we're also very focused on making sure that we're returning capital to shareholders. We, you know, have talked about our framework of 90 to 100 percent of organic free cash flow return through dividends and share buyback, and we've been able to do that even with the Depop acquisition. And so it's just, you know, we're really focused on making sure that we can kind of do it all, continue to grow the top line, but also, you know, have predictable returns to shareholders through both buybacks and dividends.

So we've got a few minutes left, Jamie. Bring us home with sort of bringing that all together. We talked a lot today about where you want to take the buyers and sellers on the platform, how you want to grow the platform, how you want to invest in the platform. What are the two or three strategic priorities that you're the most excited about for the company when you look out of the next couple of years?

Yeah, first thing I'd say is what I feel great about is, you know, why I feel great about the durability of the growth is that the areas that we've been investing in in years are the areas where we're seeing really outsized growth. I talked about the 70% of our business growing north of 20%. Our focus categories now represent 40% of our business. They're growing at 26%. And I'm excited by the strong growth rates we're seeing in our new businesses like vehicles and live. The second thing I'd say is that I'm really excited for how AI is this real tailwind for our business. We have seen great success with magical listings, but every single week and month, the team is innovating on things like natural language search. Think about the recommendations. Peggy talked about how strong AI is for our advertising business. Our marketing team, when you think about eBay's 2.6 billion listings and how much of a long tail of inventory that is, and the ability to communicate in a new way with a customer, because now you can write their email subject lines leveraging AI, and we're seeing 80% better engagement. When I talk about 50% listings per lister. I've been around this business for 2001. It's very rare to see things like this have that outsize of an impact. And so we're going to continue to push the envelope on what that does for AI. And then the last thing I would say is this trust, this enablement layer, the works that we're doing in innovating and shipping, like the examples that I talked about, are really great for the overall platform because it helps differentiate not only our inventory, but the value-added services that we provide because of that inventory. And those things coming together, I think, are really powerful. So when you think about going forward, you know, Peggy just talked about one of our newest categories, which is coins. We continue to innovate in fashion. Vehicles, we're only a year into it, and we're already at $100 million of dollars in run rate. We see lots of opportunity to continue to drive that growth in these new categories, and those things all, you know, build on each other. I hate to overuse the word flywheel, but it is a really nice part of the strategy that we have to reinventing the future of e-commerce for those enthusiasts. So excited about the quarters, months, and years ahead.

Well, we're never against using the word flywheel, so we're all for that. JV, Peggy, thanks so much for being part of the conference. Please join me in thanking eBay for attending this year.