eBay Inc. (EBAY) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. My name is Nathan Feather. I'm Morgan Stanley's small and mid-cap Internet analyst. I'm pleased to be joined by Jamie Iannone, eBay's CEO; and Peggy Alford, eBay's CFO. Thanks so much for being here.

Thanks for having us.

All right. Before we get a quick housekeeping item for important disclosures, please see the Morgan in research disclosures website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. And with that, let's begin.

Now although everyone knows eBay, we've seen a lot of investors come back to the story in the past year or so. Jamie, can you give a high-level compare and contrast of where eBay was when you rejoined the business versus where it's at today?

Yes. Thanks for the question, Nathan. So I came back to eBay about 6 years ago. And when I came back, I really refocused on us back on our roots of non-new and seasoned, which is now 90% of what we sell on the platform and really got us aligned around 3 strategic focus areas. First is focus categories. We've invested in these categories now about 35% of our experience. They're growing faster than the rest of the business. In 2025, they grew 12%. And we really have this playbook of driving leading customer satisfaction, game-changing levels of trust, vertical-specific marketing that's worked really well. The second big bucket has been focused on our C2C business, our consumer to consumer, which is about 25% of our business. And there, we've been doing a lot of marketing around the benefits of C2C, converting more buyers into sellers, building new technologies to make it easier to list. And that's been very successful as we've made some innovations, especially in our European markets that have really helped drive that business. And then third is just our focus on e-commerce as a business. If you look at our focus in terms of leaning into used and pre-loved, it's now grown over 40% of what's on the platform, is used and refurbished and continues to grow well and faster than new products on the platform. And those kind of focus areas for us that we've been working on now represent about 2/3 of the business on the site. And last year, they grew 10%. And so it's really helped us kind of define eBay, the role that we play, the unique positioning in the market and one that's really kind of leaning in, especially to where the consumer is going.

A lot I want to get into there. But let's talk about Depop. You recently signed an agreement to acquire that asset, hopefully closing in 2Q. Can you walk us through why you chose to acquire Depop? Why now was the right time? And how are you thinking about the potential revenue and/or cost synergies?

Yes. So we have 5 categories on eBay that are north of $10 billion. And one of the key ones that we've been investing in has been fashion. So fashion is an over $10 billion category on the platform. It's been growing fast. It grew 10% in the U.S. last year. And if you just think about that, that's $0.5 billion just in that one category of growth. And we saw an opportunity to lean in and acquire Depop, which is really synergistic and we think can supercharge what we're seeing with fashion and with the C2C that I talked about. Specifically, a great marketplace of Gen Z and millennials. It's been -- the fastest-growing demographic on eBay has been Gen Z and millennials, but we see a massive TAM in terms of what's happening in pre-loved fashion and that demographic. For Depop, 90% of their users are below the age of 34. And when you look at the sell to buy flywheel that they've got going on in the marketplace, they've got about 7 million buyers and over 1/3 of them also sell in the marketplace, and it drives real kind of great velocity into a younger demographic, which frankly is much more focused on sustainability than I was at that age. I don't know how many of you have daughters that drag you to thrift shops, but they're also on Depop reselling clothing and listing clothing. And so we saw an opportunity to take great things that we have invested in over the years, things like authenticity guarantee and shipping capabilities and advanced marketing tools and payments and financial services and bring them to Depop to be able to kind of continue the great growth that we're seeing over the marketplace. I mean they're growing 60% in the U.S. And so we're going to kind of continue that growth while leveraging the great assets that eBay has built.

Well, speaking of great growth, your GMV growth has accelerated throughout 2025, particular success in the back half given 8% FX-neutral GMV growth in 3Q and 4Q. The market's really been surprised at the par magnitude of this improvement. So help us understand what drove that acceleration?

You want to take that, Peggy?

Sure. What's been so exciting is that it's been broad-based and for the most part, durable. We called out a few areas that were specific that we thought potentially either we're lapping or things that would not consider things like Bullion, where we saw a lot of acceleration due to precious metal prices that we said may not be durable. We talked about some of the lapping items around Klarna and the positive marketing environment. But overall, we just saw broad-based strength, which gives us a lot of comfort that this will continue. The areas of our strategic focus. Jamie talked about focused categories, he talked about e-commerce. C2C. These are all areas that -- it's 2/3 of our GMV, growing at 10%. When you look at focused categories, 12% growth and we feel like a lot of this is extremely durable, and it gives us a lot of confidence when we go in -- when we look into '26, we talked about GMV being similar growth as prior year. And so it's just been really exciting to see the playbook work and see the areas of focus have such strength and then when you look at some of the areas that we invested in last year like shipping, we brought forward the shipping road map, in a large part, an answer to some of the trade policy and tariff dynamics. But what we saw was it added a lot of health to our marketplace overall. Obviously, shipping is a big part of our CBT business. And so continuing to improve those tools around shipping just bolsters the sort of resiliency of the marketplace. And so it just makes us really confident that there's a lot of strength ahead.

One of the success areas you mentioned there is in collectibles, real strong point with outsized traction, both trading cards and coins and bullion. How are you thinking about the portion of that, that's macro growth versus idiosyncratic improvements? Said another way, do you think the performance in these subcategories is more cyclical or structural?

What's interesting is we feel like most of it is structural. And a lot of it has to do with the specific innovation that we've brought to the category when you think about our magical listing product, if you think about some of the Agentic search capabilities or if you think about some of the acquisitions that we've done in the past, the partnership with PSA, the acquisition of Goldin and TCGplayer. All of these things combined with the innovation that we've done internally has really created a lot of strength in the category. And a lot of folks think about Pokemon when they think about collectibles or think about trading cards. But within trading cards, there's the 3 sports that have been very strong. There are other sort of games like Magic: The Gathering that's been strong. And then even outside of trading cards, there's other collectibles that have been -- we talked about toys and all of these have contributed to what we view as very durable strength. On Pokemon, we did talk about the fact that we think that the growth may moderate after Q1, but that's really because it's been triple-digit growth, and we expect to lap some of that and the comps become more pronounced as we go through the year. But despite that, we expect Pokemon to continue to grow. And so it's just been very encouraging sort of the diversity of strength within the business that gives us a lot of confidence that while growth in any one area may not be linear, overall, the growth is durable.

Another area you've seen some momentum is one of the newer verticals, eBay Live, now tracking an annualized run rate of about 7x year-on-year. Is this a business that didn't get much interest from investors until maybe 3 or 6 months ago? What are the steps you're taking here to gain share within that market? And how should we think about the investment needed to achieve your aspirations?

Yes. Look, it's really exciting to see what's happening with eBay Live. It's a great new medium for sellers and buyers to transact. Our sellers have really gravitated to it. And that's what's driving the growth numbers that you talked about. And we've been kind of leaning into that opportunity. So we've been expanding into geographies. In Q4, we launched in Australia and Germany. Since then, we've actually launched in France and Italy and Canada. We've been leaning in to continue to drive development on the platform and adding new features, auto charge, combined shipping, a new flash sale capability, buy it now, a new seller host console and continue to drive the innovation because of what we're seeing in the category and the excitement between sellers and buyers. What's really nice is that we see a real kind of synergy back to their core business for our sellers. So they're finding buyers saying, "Oh, I found you because of eBay Live and now I'm shopping in your core or built a new trust with the seller because I've been watching them do lives, and that's been really great to see." It's helped people discover new enthusiast areas because they can now watch a seller live. It reminds me of the community elements of the early 2000s of eBay, where I see sellers and buyers interacting, buyers interacting with each other and the real excitement around kind of entertainment and commerce coming together. In terms of investment, we've been investing into it in the new geographies and the capabilities. All of that is contemplated in the outlook that Peggy talked about in our last earnings, which had strong top and bottom line growth and we see it as a great long-term opportunity. If you go to some of these newest markets that we just launched, live commerce is still relatively nascent. And there's a really big kind of market opportunity across categories and sellers and buyers.

Okay. Great. Well, one area I do really want to touch on is agentic commerce. I know it's early days here, but can you help us envision how you're thinking about the on-site agentic opportunity for eBay? And what are some of the features or tools you're thinking of that could really level up the consumer experience?

Yes. I'm really excited to bring these technologies to the platform. Some examples of things that we've talked about recently are our newest generation of magical listing is a true game changer for listing products on the platform. When you think about the vision that I gave to the team was, assume AI existed, how would you list a product on eBay? And that's what we built in this next generation. And so if I held up a pair of sneakers to my camera, I would say, great sneakers, show me the label. You take a picture of the label. It absorbs all that information. And it all works seamlessly in the background. The agentic technology just builds the listing. eBay has real-time proprietary data on what stuff sells for. So it's like, do you want to sell them quickly or do you want to maximize the value, we help you drive kind of all of that. And it would be very different if I sold anything. If I sold a piece of electronics, it's like, "Great. I know what that is, you show me the barcode." It's almost like selling with a friend, but the friend is this like super powerful with all the kind of background of eBay's product knowledge graph, our real-time pricing data, et cetera. And so that's 1 example. We're building out agentic search capabilities so that you can use natural language search on the platform and be able to work through our 2.5 billion listings in a compelling new way, which is great. We're helping our sellers do things like write the initial responses to buyers' questions using AI technologies. We're using it in our own communications with customers. We're having AI write the subject lines out to our customers. We're seeing a 40% increase in our click-through rates. So really kind of across the board. And what's exciting is that when I come to conferences like this, people are like, wow, you guys are building so much in AI, but you've kept your expenses at the same level, 4% to 5% of our CapEx. And that's because we've done a lot of things with kind of proprietary models and our hybrid cloud, and we've built one of the world's largest supercomputers. And so how we're doing it, leveraging our unique data set has also been really compelling.

Great. Now similarly, can you share how you're viewing the off-site agentic opportunity? We've seen various e-commerce players partner with different model providers. How do you see the space evolving? And what are you looking for in partnerships to create really a win-win scenario?

Yes. Look, we've always been open to taking our sellers' inventory and exposing it on other surfaces. You've seen us do that with Google Shopping. We're doing that with Facebook Marketplace and the tests we're running there. We just expanded to a new service we're testing inside of Facebook Marketplace on their search platform. Over the course of the last -- end of last year, we built what we call the unified agentic commerce platform, which actually allows us to work with partners and do it in the right way where we're leveraging our hybrid cloud, our unique data set that we own, our MCP, et cetera. And that's what we're using in the tests that we're doing. So for example, we're testing with the OpenAI ad test pilot right now in doing that. But my first priority has always been to build those technologies onto eBay so our enthusiast buyers could leverage in it. It's why we built the newest version of magical listing. It's why we're building agentic search. Because we come at this from a point of view that we think we're a very strong beneficial -- beneficiary of AI in the short and the long term, because eBay has a really unique set of inventory, right? 90% of what we sell is non-new and seasoned. It's not stuff that's generally kind of out there more broadly. We've wrapped that over the years with things like authenticity guarantee and guaranteed fit and money back guarantee and the ability to ship it throughout the world where we handle everything. And so the value-added services and the game-changing level of trust, also makes that inventory incredibly unique on the platform. And when you think about our enthusiast buyers and what they're buying, they're mainly more considered purchases, right? These are not purchases that you just don't think about. In fact, there's an experiential component to shopping these things. It's why live is growing so fast because people love the experience of shopping in these categories. So for all of those reasons, we feel really good about our positioning with it, how we're leveraging it internally and what we're learning from the test externally.

Okay. Great. Now Peggy, can you give a sense of the ways in which eBay leveraging gen AI kind of internally on the back end to reduce cost to help increase your productivity?

Sure. Some of the early things that we did with AI was really focused in product and technology and really wanting to both increase -- decrease the product development life cycle using AI. What we've been able to do in that area for customer-facing items is really develop really quick prototypes, like working prototypes to be able to test and be able to do that in a much shorter time frame, which really sort of increases the amount of throughput that we have for product and development. We -- one of the other early things that we did that was to enable our customer support agents to have -- to use AI to have sort of almost like a partner be able to resolve customer needs much more quickly. And it was so successful in terms of creating both a richer experience between the agent and the customer as well as sort of reduce the cost, create some cost efficiency within the function that we said we should actually use this for our sellers because a lot of what they are answering from customers, especially in the C2C model, are things that are in the listing. And so just sort of like freeing up their time to be able to sell more, and that was using some of the technology that we developed internally. And then -- but really across every function, we are really looking to look at each process, each opportunity for automation to really create the capacity to invest in these strategic priorities that we talked about and be able to enable our employees to really focus on value-added functions and do it without increasing the resources within a business that continues to grow.

Now one of the features I want to really highlight here has been a lot of things you're doing in the selling experience. And I know, Jamie, you've talked about this a little bit. So just help me think through what have been the major successes to date as we're kind of rolling out this next generation of magical listings? And then to the extent you are able to remove that friction from sellers. How does that impact GMV growth and your ability to both attract an increasing engagement with C2C sellers?

Yes, great question. So if you think about it, the average American household has about $4,000 of stuff that could be sold online and less than 20% of it is online. And if you go home today and walk around your house, you'll probably realize, "Oh, yes, I'm not using this. This could be sold, et cetera." And so the whole opportunity is to unlock all of that TAM and all that inventory to drive that. And the reason we built this new version of magical listing is I always wanted to have this vision of, if it's that easy to list, of course, I'm going to sell it. I had 1 investor tell me he's walking out the door, he's like it's so easy. Now my son, I have him selling all this stuff, and he gets to keep the proceeds. He's like, you've made it too easy. I can't distract them enough selling on the platform. But -- so when you look at the metrics, right, the listings per lister now are up over 50% with this new tool. We've decreased the time by more than a quarter. We've got customer satisfaction rates at like 95%. That's because when you use it, it's so compelling to unlock all that inventory. We're also doing it because the younger generation is very -- much more focused on sustainability. And so how do we kind of unlock all of that inventory and drive e-commerce. It's now actually chic to buy a pre-loved handbag versus a new handbag on the platform. And so that's been our focus for us. It's been working out really well. I'm excited to see it. It's led to very strong C2C growth in all of our geographies, and I think we're going to continue to see that momentum for quite some time.

Okay. Well, heard a lot on gen AI and its possibilities. I guess wrapping up in this section, I guess, can you talk through what's the most underappreciated opportunity in your view? And then also the most underappreciated challenge or a limiting factor to push faster?

Yes. So I think for us -- I actually feel lucky to be CEO of eBay right now because what a canvas, what a rich set of years of data, amazing experiences to really just take all that friction out of the experience. And I can't think of a part of the experience where we're not using or attempting to use AI to really kind of change that experience. You think about like 20% of our business is across borders and how do we help people communicate and translate. You think about our advertising business and how do we use AI to make it more compelling as an advertiser and also to do all the work on your behalf, kind of leveraging these technologies. The work that we're doing in selling, the work that we're doing in buying and search, the work that we're doing in recommendations and putting stuff in front of customers and CRM. It's really, I think, broad-based in terms of the opportunity to really change the experience across eBay and to continue the work that we've done in focused categories in C2C and e-commerce, but now kind of accentuated with AI. On the challenge side, I think if companies aren't taking advantage of it, that's a massive challenge. I mean we are leaning in so aggressively. I've got a huge AI week, I do every year. It's a huge part of our customer experience and what Peggy talked about, how we're working internally. One of the fun challenges of eBay is it's an unstructured inventory. It's 2.5 billion listings. So the problems are somewhat complex. So that's one of our challenges. But on the upside, AI makes that easier. We've been able to build a product knowledge graph, get kind of amazing real-time pricing data and leverage these technologies to take advantage of some of the challenges that we've worked on over the years. So we are 200% all in, both for our customers and for how we work internally and our speed of innovation.

Now, talking a lot about growth and the 6% FX-neutral GMV growth for '26, it's far higher than people expected. But how do you think about balancing that growth with profitability and the flow-through from GMV to operating income? And given that, what are the key investment areas you're leaning into? And how do you think about the payback period on those?

Sure. We've always been very focused on driving top line growth, and you're starting to see that in the numbers. But we are equally -- want to make sure that the flow-through to operating income and EPS and driving operating income growth is also something that we're really focused on. And we're doing that through ensuring that we are being really smart and disciplined with the areas we're investing in. You heard us talk about our strategic focus areas, and that's really where we're more focus, focused categories, C2C, e-commerce. But at the same time, some of our newer growth vectors in live and vehicles where we know that there's a lot of TAM and a lot of growth to come. We created a financial architecture that enables us to really focus on freeing up capacity through some of the things we talked about, the focus on AI, automation, efficiency to drive capacity to continue to be able to invest in these areas. And you saw in 2025, when we had acceleration that was not necessarily anticipated. We used some of that to continue to drive investment in some of these strategic growth areas. But also we're able to drive really healthy operating income growth. And so it's a very balanced approach. We know that the areas where we've invested in are paying off. And so we want to invest more in that. When you think about when acquiring Depop once that closes, we'll be investing in growth there that's been anticipated in the outlook that we provided. And so we're focused on doing both. We know that driving top line growth enables a profitable business model, but we also want to create efficiency so that we're creating more capacity to invest in that growth.

And putting a finer point on that, adjusted operating income margins have stayed within the range of 27% to 28% over the past few years. How are you thinking about the longer-term margin opportunity from here given all that opportunity for investment. And does the Depop acquisition alter maybe that trajectory?

We are really focused on operating income growth. There's a lot of the dynamics in the portfolio of our business that can sort of change the margin, the actual margins. But by focusing on sort of top line GMV growth and focusing on operating income growth in EPS, we feel like that drives a very healthy business. As it relates to Depop, our initial focus after close, of course, is going to be on just continuing to support the very healthy growth that we've seen from Depop. We talked about getting to profitability in 2028. But our initial focus is going -- is really just to support the very healthy growth that we're seeing. And then we'll be looking at areas where we can drive synergy. When we think about some of the things that eBay has focused on, things like authenticity, shipping, payments, listing, these are all areas that we know can be very synergistic with a really attractive business that Depop has built organically. And -- so we'll be looking for areas where we can sort of drive those synergies while also recognizing that the Depop business is a great brand and a great stand-alone business.

Okay. Great. Now moving to take rate, you've guided that to be in line or slightly ahead of last year on an FX-neutral basis. What are the puts and takes for take rate as we think through 2026? And longer term, do you see room to just durably expand that? And how should we think about that trajectory?

Yes. So Advertising continues to be a huge positive driver to take rate. Some of the offsetting sort of pressure to take rate in '26. We continue to have -- because of the trust we've built on the platform, we see ASP increasing. And so that obviously pressures take rate but drives very profitable bottom line growth. When you think about sort of the trade environment and tariffs, that has had impact on our CBT business, and they tend to adopt our advertising and other products at a higher rate, and so that puts some pressure on take rate. Also, some of our more nascent areas like vehicles, which is a higher ASP puts pressure on take rate and live where we're really focused on growing that business and optimizing the experience and a little less focused in the very near term around monetization. So those are kind of the puts and takes on take rates. But overall, we feel very comfortable that we're thinking about sort of equally balancing top line and operating income growth.

Now, with all of that very profitable business and -- help us think through the capital allocation framework you've had. You have been somewhat acquisitive over the past few years? And so help us understand what's your M&A philosophy, what areas you believe could be complementary to the business, especially the Depop acquisition and then fit that into the broader capital allocation framework.

Sure. Yes. So we've always utilized build by partner framework. And we've really been focused on -- if we think about the acquisitions that we've done, take in the collectibles area, we have really focused on building and innovating in the space through. You talked about the bulk listing capability, magical listing, those are areas that we've built ourselves. Then you saw us buy TCGplayer and Goldin and this added a really synergistic set of businesses to an already strong category. And then our partnership with PSA, that really bolstered the overall business in -- with what we built organically as well as what we bought. And so it's just a great example of how we think about M&A and partnership within our build and innovation strategy. And so that's -- we'll continue to think about it like that. When you think about Depop, it was buying it from a position of strength and to a fashion category that's growing really nicely, but also enabling us to reach a demographic that is younger and really bolster the fashion category that's growing very nicely in the U.S. In terms of our broader capital allocation strategy, what we've talked about is that we are targeting between 90% and 100% of free -- organic free cash flow, our normalized free cash flow in '26. We have talked about doing a -- targeting a buyback of $2 billion. And if you take that with our dividends, that fits within that framework of 90% to 100% of normalized free cash flow.

Now if we drop all the way down the income statement to EPS, how should we think about the bridge from operating income to EPS, especially given some one-offs this year?

Sure. There's a couple of things in '26 that we've called out. We did change our tax rate by 1 point, and that was just due to both some changes in the tax law as well as sort of the geographic dynamic of our business. We talked about what we're planning around our share buyback framework. In terms of the -- in Q1, we expect interest income and interest expense to offset. We expect interest expense to be a bit of a headwind in the remaining 3 quarters of the year because of the interest rate environment as well as the fact that we used the cash. We did an all-cash deal for the Depop acquisition.

Okay. Now one other area we've got a lot of questions from investors on is just the split between U.S. and international growth. U.S. has really been the source of a lot of the outsized performance over the past few quarters. And so help us think through the delta between those 2 lines, what's driven a lot of the success in the U.S.? And maybe conversely, was held back international growth a little bit.

Yes. I would say -- I'll start and then you feel free to add. I think there's a couple of differences. One is the macro conditions are very different, right? So if you look at international right now, specifically our largest markets in U.K. and Germany, you're seeing very low consumer confidence, retail sales being down sequentially between Q3 and Q4. And I think that, that obviously plays a role. Secondarily it's just the tariffs for us, they're based on with the country of origin of where the seller is. And so we're seeing some of that domestic substitution in the U.S. from those components there. But the positive side of things on those 2 headwinds is that the stuff that we're investing in, the areas that we're focused on, we're seeing similar traction internationally than we are in the U.S., which makes us feel good as we kind of move out of the macro that we'll see the same type of thing in our international businesses. Our focused category growth numbers that we talked about, the 12% and 16% last quarter are global numbers, that's working really well. The investments in C2C are working well for us internationally. We recently expanded into eBay live because we think there's big opportunity and a huge TAM in what are relatively nascent markets. So we feel good about the ultimate growth as we get through some of the kind of the headwinds that we've talked about from a macro perspective.

Okay. Great. Well, one last 1 for you both. Can you leave us with maybe 1 or 2 aspects of the business you feel are most misunderstood or underappreciated by investors?

Yes. I would say first, I feel like AI is going to be such an amazing opportunity for eBay. When I think about what we can do on the customer experience side, we're just getting started. And when I look at the metrics that we're seeing from our newest version of magical listing, where we're seeing 50% more listings per list and you think about applying that to so many different parts of the experience, it's phenomenal. And eBay has had mid-80% organic traffic. Because we sell differentiated inventory that nobody else has. And our enthusiast buyers, which make up 70% of GMV, love that shopping experience and the experiential side of that. And when I talk to them and we show them some of these new technologies, it's like, "Wow, I love that. I'm going to do my safe searches that way." And it really is going to be incredibly powerful for the platform. I think the second thing is just how broad-based the growth that we're seeing on the platform is right now. It's across categories, it's across ASP, it's across different types of buyers in the platform. We called out strength that we're seeing in fashion and collectibles, parts and accessories adding a point of growth, electronics. And so it's really -- what we're seeing is a really healthy, broad-based growth on the backs of the areas that we've been investing in for years. So on the backs of strong growth and focused categories, on the back of really accelerating mid-teens growth in our C2C business, on the backs of kind of the growth that we're seeing in e-commerce. And I've been at eBay. I've been back 6 years. I was involved with the company for 8 years before. And I've never seen the business this healthy in terms of what we're seeing in our ability to drive growth. And I think more importantly, coming back to the first point is I'm really excited by the road map of what we have for 2026. We haven't talked a lot about it externally, but our pace of innovation is changing at the company with these new technologies. Our ability to put like working prototypes in front of customers in a matter of days. And eBay is an open book test, right? You just go talk to your community, they'll tell you how to work the next kind of product area that you're working on. We're getting tons of feedback on live, which is accelerating what we're doing there. So our ability to kind of continue to do that on the road map for '26 for me is really exciting, and I'm looking forward to a great year.

Okay. Awesome. Jamie, Peggy, thank you so much for being here.

Thanks for having us.

Thank you. Thanks for having us.