eBay at Goldman Sachs Conference: Strategic Focus on AI and Enthusiast Buyers

Published 08/09/2025, 20:16
© Reuters.

On Monday, 08 September 2025, eBay Inc. (NASDAQ:EBAY) presented at the Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference 2025. CEO Jamie Iannone and CFO Peggy Alford outlined eBay’s strategic priorities, highlighting the company’s focus on enthusiast buyers, AI-driven innovation, and its resilience in a challenging macroeconomic environment. While eBay’s marketplace remains strong, the company faces headwinds, particularly in Europe.

Key Takeaways

  • eBay is leveraging AI to enhance buyer and seller experiences, with tools like Magical Listings.
  • The company reported strong growth in focus categories, notably collectibles and luxury goods.
  • eBay’s cross-border trade accounts for 20% of its Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV).
  • Enthusiast buyers, who spend an average of $3,200 annually, represent 70% of GMV.
  • eBay increased its share buyback program to $2.5 billion and has seen a 29% dividend increase over six years.

Financial Results

  • GMV: eBay handles approximately $75 billion in GMV annually.
  • Focus Categories Growth: Grew by 5% last year, 6% in Q1, and 10% in Q2.
  • Advertising Growth: First-party advertising business grew by 17% in the most recent quarter.
  • Capital Allocation: The share buyback program was increased to $2.5 billion, with dividends rising by 29% over six years.

Operational Updates

  • AI Initiatives: Over 200 million listings created using AI tools, with half a million listings generated daily.
  • Cross-Border Trade: Represents 20% of GMV, with eBay International Shipping expanding to Canadian sellers.
  • Partnerships: Collaborations with Klarna, Collectors Universe, Marks and Spencer, and McLaren enhance eBay’s offerings.
  • Acquisitions: Acquired Caramel to improve the motors parts and accessories experience.

Future Outlook

  • Strategic Priorities: Expanding focus categories to over a third of the site and strengthening C2C businesses in the UK and Germany.
  • Advertising Target: Aiming for a medium-term take rate of 3%.
  • Macroeconomic Outlook: eBay is monitoring consumer demand and adjusting strategies to mitigate potential impacts.

Q&A Highlights

  • AI Application: eBay uses proprietary LLM models and supercomputers to enhance platform experiences.
  • Competitive Environment: eBay leverages its advantages in cross-border trade with innovative shipping solutions.
  • Take Rate and Margins: The focus remains on driving revenue growth while managing margins.

In conclusion, eBay’s presentation at the conference showcased a company focused on strategic growth and innovation. For a deeper dive, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript.

Full transcript - Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference 2025:

Unidentified speaker, Conference Organizer/Moderator: Okay. I think in the interest of time, we’re going to keep moving with our next one here. It’s my pleasure to introduce the team from eBay. We have Jamie Iannone, CEO, and Peggy Alford, new CFO. First off, to start with saying, Peggy, congrats on the new role.

Peggy Alford, CFO, eBay: Thanks.

Unidentified speaker, Conference Organizer/Moderator: To both of you, congrats on eBay’s 30th anniversary. There was a lot of press coverage around it. Congratulations on the milestone for the company. What were some of the memories of celebrating it with the team and with being out there talking about it the last couple of days?

Jamie Iannone, CEO, eBay: Yeah, we had our very first employee who still is with the company there. We had longtime sellers there representing the company, which was awesome. It was fun celebrating 30 years, but it was also a moment to talk about we’re just getting started and all the excitement that’s happening in the company. It was fun.

Unidentified speaker, Conference Organizer/Moderator: I want to take that as the jumping-off point because you’ve been on quite a journey since even just you came into this role in the company and took over the leadership role. Talk a little bit about the journey you’ve been on and what some of your big strategic priorities are looking forward.

Jamie Iannone, CEO, eBay: Yeah. For those of you that are new to the eBay story, let me just back up and share a little bit. When I came back, I was at the company in the early 2000s. When I came back five years ago, we really refocused the company on non-new and seasoned inventory, which is now about 90% of what we sell. Think used, refurbished, or last season’s, or new with tags, etc. That’s been a really great strategic pivot for us. We also started focusing on category by category, building really the next level of experiences. We call those our focus categories on the platform. We’ve been growing the number and really accelerating what we’re doing there on the experience, on the trust, on the inventory, etc. That’s been working out really well for the company.

We got focused on a strategy of reinventing the future of e-commerce for enthusiasts, built on three pillars: relevant experiences, scalable solutions, and magical innovations. That’s worked out really well. On that third pillar of magical innovations, we’ve been really leaning into AI and how we leverage that to really take all the friction out of the experience on eBay and create these game-changing experiences for our customers. For those that don’t know the scale of eBay, it’s a pretty significant scale. We have about 134 million buyers on the platform. We ship to 190 different countries. We do about $75 billion of GMV on the platform. About 20% of what we do is cross-border trade. Really, entirely a marketplace for buyers and sellers. We don’t sell anything ourselves.

When you look at the recent success that we’ve had on the business, whether that was the numbers that we put up in Q2 or the guidance that we put out there in Q3, you see the real kind of financial strength and underlying health of the business, which has been performing quite well, really based on the backs of the strategy that we have driving forward, the changes that we’ve seen in customer satisfaction, how we’ve leaned in against AI to really help us grow the business. Overall, though, like I said about the 30th, you know we’re just getting started. There’s so much potential in this business, in any of the categories that we’re in. We can get into it, Eric, but we recently announced two new areas of growth, one being the vehicles business that we’re selling in the collectible cars market, a $75 billion market.

We’ve seen some great success with eBay Live, a new live commerce format on eBay. The overall core business is really healthy. Excited for a path where we came from, but much more excited for the future.

Unidentified speaker, Conference Organizer/Moderator: Maybe two quick follow-ups on AI because I think you obviously made it a pretty big cornerstone of where you want to go strategically. Where do you see the most friction on the buyer or the seller part of the marketplace where AI can be applied to? What most excites you about reducing friction on either side of the marketplace?

Jamie Iannone, CEO, eBay: Let me start with the selling side. What’s exciting about eBay is that the average household has $3,000 to $4,000 of items sitting in their house that they could sell, and less than 20% of that is online. A big part of our AI focus, Eric, is how do we use that technology to unlock all of that inventory? Many quarters ago, we launched a product called Magical Listings. Think about that as really just holding your camera up to an item. We recognize it, we write the description for you, we fill in the data fields that you need to put in there. We have 30 years of amazing pricing data, so we tell you how to price it. We put it on a beautiful background and make your item look gorgeous, and really kind of help drive our overall kind of C2C business.

These products are now being used at scale. Over 200 million listings have been created, and over 10 million sellers have used our listing tools. Every single day, a half a million listings are coming on, leveraging the AI that we’ve built on the platform to really drive it at massive scale. We’re not just stopping with listing. We’re looking at the full end-to-end process of saying, how do we use AI to make you a better seller on the platform and help you grow as a seller on the platform? Just a few weeks ago, we announced we’re now leveraging AI to help our sellers respond to buyers’ questions. We’ve been one of the leaders on the customer service side with self-service and leveraging AI from that perspective. We’ve now turned that over to our community and said, you can use the same technology for your buyers.

If a buyer asks, you know what condition it’s in or something that is available to the AI, it will just answer those questions, saving the seller time to provide it. Think about a customer that only speaks one language, wanting to communicate with a seller that speaks a different language. These are the types of things that we’re leveraging AI to help our sellers on the platform. On the buy side, it’s equally compelling in being able to show new discovery, new inspiration. We have shop-the-look features to help you shop and see different styles based on whatever style of apparel you’re into and what size you’re into. We now have endless feeds of discovery that we’ve built in a new explore feature that lets you see inspiration.

eBay’s historically been a very search-driven marketplace where people come in and, "I know I want this Buck Mason thing or this Lululemon." Now we’re building these great kind of AI-based things on the front end, which really change the experience. I could go on forever because it’s easier for me to talk about where we’re not using AI than where we are using it because we’re really looking at that experience from a customer standpoint, as well as everything about how our employees work to really leverage that to change eBay in a pretty dramatic way.

Unidentified speaker, Conference Organizer/Moderator: Okay. Really interesting. Peggy, let me bring you into the conversation. In your role as the CFO, obviously, there’s a fairly complex world out there. We’re dealing with tariffs. We’re dealing with changes in de minimis exemptions. When you look at the broader consumer demand landscape and the elements of some of these uncertainties playing out in the broader macro environment, maybe reflect a little bit about what you’re seeing in terms of consumer demand and how that factors into planning to match the strategy with the allocation of OpEx and things like that.

Peggy Alford, CFO, eBay: Sure. First, I’ll just say that I’m so excited to be back here at eBay. I’m a boomerang who was here in the early 2000s. I think the focus that the company has had around sort of a differentiated right-to-win focus around the focus categories and some of the horizontal has built a very resilient marketplace. That marketplace, though, is obviously not immune to the macro conditions out there. I think the strength that we have in the breadth of our platform helps, but we definitely have seen, you know, for many quarters, the impact of a pressured consumer from a discretionary spending perspective, especially in Europe and some of our large markets in Germany and the UK, where the macro environment has been very challenged. We have seen, you know, the consumer demand pressure in the U.S.

Consumer spend has been a little more resilient, and we saw that in the strength of our numbers in the U.S. We’ve really been just really focused on, you know, if you think about non-new and seasoned, sometimes the consumer is looking for a deal in these times. For that reason, eBay has really, you know, been able to sort of counter some of that macro pressure. From a tariff perspective, very uncertain times through the year, a lot of volatility. In Q1 and Q2, we were able to, you know, really counter some of the volatility, and we didn’t see a lot of impact to our business.

We did, however, because of all the uncertainty in the second half, build a lot of scenarios in the guidance that were released in Q2 for the rest of the year that contemplates a number of the scenarios like de minimis that we’ve seen rolled out. We also have been really focused on building tools to help our sellers navigate these uncertain times. I think a lot of the tools that we have at eBay have really helped our sellers do just that. I think the focus that we have on what we can control around our focus categories is where we put our focus. I’ve been excited to see the growth that we’ve been able to post despite all this uncertainty.

Unidentified speaker, Conference Organizer/Moderator: Thank you for that. I want to take Peggy’s answer and bring it back to you, Jamie. When you think about your enthusiast buyer base and you think about aligning them with your focus categories, talk a little bit about what you’re seeing from enthusiast buyers today, how that activity level might evolve over time, and how much of it is tied back to some of your focus category efforts.

Jamie Iannone, CEO, eBay: Yeah. When you look at our enthusiast buyers, we have about 16 million enthusiasts on the platform. They spend about $3,200 a year. They make up about 70% of the GMV on the platform. What we’ve been really focused on is how to give them more tools and capabilities to be successful on the platform. Whether that be guaranteed fit in motors parts and accessories or what we’re doing in authenticity to really drive that behavior, we’ve been leaning into full-funnel marketing on the platform, from the top of the funnel down to go after and acquire enthusiasts. Think like at the Met Gala, for the first time, you had influencers like Chappell Roan and Emma Chamberlain. They’re talking about eBay. Actually, the very first time ever that someone was dressed head to toe in a non-designer outfit, so entirely sourced from eBay, which was pretty exciting.

You think about what we’re doing with McLaren. We’ve got a new partnership in the UK with Marks and Spencer around pre-owned clothing and bringing that into Marks and Spencer stores and selling it on eBay. Really an opportunity to continue to go after and drive that enthusiasm. What’s compelling about eBay is that when we acquire enthusiasts, they tend to shop across the whole platform. We get a real cross-category shopping benefit. Just take handbags as one of our categories on the site. If a buyer comes in and buys handbags on the platform, a handbag over $500, they’ll end up spending $1,500 on handbags on eBay. Then they’ll buy $7,000 outside of handbags in other categories on the platform. That’s a massive advantage for us when you think about the CAC that we can afford, the CLTV that we can create for our customers, and what that means.

In addition, we have the opportunity to turn them into a C2C seller on the platform, which further enhances their buying activity. All the efforts that we’ve been doing to drive consumer-to-consumer selling with Magical Listing, with some fee changes that we made in Europe, with new technologies that we’ve brought on to make it easier for a seller to onboard, that’s helping fuel the buyer piece as well. You can see, Eric, this great flywheel of our strategic initiative with driving the objectives of what we’re trying to do with our enthusiast buyers on the platform.

Unidentified speaker, Conference Organizer/Moderator: Maybe just double-clicking on that with one quick follow-up. Are there any aspects of those categories in particular on the focus side that you think potentially present more interesting opportunities to continue to accelerate and maintain high levels of growth versus what you’ve seen over the last 18, 24 months? You’ve certainly improved the growth rate of the company in the more recent periods.

Jamie Iannone, CEO, eBay: Yeah. For those that are new to the story, our focus categories in total grew about 5% last year. They grew 6% in Q1. In Q2, we announced that they grew 10%. In an environment where a little more than half our business is in Europe, as Peggy talked about, with some of the challenging macro environments, we’re feeling really good. That strengthened focus categories really across the board, right? If you look at our collectible space, it was our largest contributor to growth in Q2. We had some categories like Pokémon and others accelerating at triple digits. We saw really healthy double-digit growth. This is the back on a lot of strategic work that we’ve done.

We did a great partnership with Collectors Universe, which owns the PSA brand, about how it’s easier to take a card and get it graded, or take an ungraded card, get it graded, and get it sold on eBay. Those used to be multiple steps, multiple shipping legs back and forth, waiting for the card to come back. We’ve integrated that and made it seamless. We launched eBay Live, which is live commerce, and launched a number of great new features in Live to help drive the collectibles business. Collectors are loving it, right? We launched features Buy Spot where you could buy, we’re here in 49ers country, you could buy the 49ers. As cases get breaks, you get those cards. It’s super exciting.

Our luxury business has had 10 quarters now of positive growth, even through all the kind of macro stuff that we’ve been through, on the backs of a really amazing authentication. We just authenticated our 15 millionth item. It was our first quarter that we authenticated 1 million items in the quarter. We’ve been building a real new kind of value proposition in these luxury spaces. We did a partnership with Klarna for Buy Now, Pay Later in the U.S., which, you know, we had done other partnerships like that internationally. That worked out really well. That category is performing well. I’ll talk about motors parts and accessories. One of our largest focus categories on the platform, well north of $10 billion. Over 2023 and 2024, that’s been growing mid-single digits. We feel great about the performance of all the innovation that we’ve done in that category.

It’s contributed nearly one point of contribution to growth in the past quarter. You see that, as a massive category, it’s really worked for our focus category experience. What we see is really enthusiasts leaning in, loving the trust that we’ve built on the experience. We’ve built entirely new fitment-based experiences. Eric, that’s performing well. We recently acquired a company called Caramel, which really handles the end-to-end experience in motors parts and accessories with buying vehicles. Now, every day it’s fun to wake up and look at what happened yesterday on the platform. Like, all right, some guy in Florida bought a Porsche for $160,000 from somebody in South Dakota. That whole process, title, insurance, delivery, financing, all happening now end-to-end on eBay. It’s really resonating with the customer. We get to kind of, you know, there’s huge synergies with our products and accessories business.

It’s a very long answer to say across the board in focus categories, we feel really good about the innovations that we’re driving, the resulting impact of what we’re seeing with performance from the customer. We still have a lot of the categories left to go. Fashion is our newest focus category. I’m really excited by the potential in our newest focus category.

Unidentified speaker, Conference Organizer/Moderator: That’s great on those raw elements. I think I agree on the things inside your control. When you think about responding to some of the competitive environment, there were players that were taking advantage of direct ship into certain parts of the world. A lot of that competitive intensity seems like it’s at least come off a little bit. How do you think about leaning into some of your potential competitive advantages against a shifting competitive landscape that can even potentially amplify that growth as well?

Jamie Iannone, CEO, eBay: Yeah. Look, cross-border trade has always been and continues to be a massive advantage for the platform. It’s about 20% of what we do on eBay. When you think about it, even for a C2C seller, we open up access to 190 different markets. A big part of that, Eric, is the shipping solutions that we’ve built to make that really easy. If I’m sitting here in this country and I want to sell something to someone in Sweden, now on eBay, all I do is I ship it to Chicago. It’s a domestic transaction. eBay takes care of the rest: duties, taxes, returns. All those elements are handled by eBay, which makes it an incredible experience. If I think about our businesses based in China or Japan, we can build these solutions like Speedpack, which started in China, now ends up in China, other quarters.

Basically, it provides transparency to the buyer. It has the end-to-end elements of having all clarity of what’s included in the transaction. It makes it super easy. We run some ventures where sellers can help forward deploy their inventory into their end market. That’s helped not only speed up transaction times, but also adjust for things like bringing over goods at a cost of goods level, etc. We just announced our newest one, which is coming in another month or so, which is that same technology we built. We call it eBay International Shipping. It will now be available to our Canadian sellers, where it’s basically seamless to make the shipping happen. We’re really leaning in to take advantage of the unique elements that we provide for sellers and buyers because our job is to make their lives easier.

All of these things are really designed to just take the friction out of the experience, make it super easy, and open up a much larger market, especially for our sellers in the marketplace.

Unidentified speaker, Conference Organizer/Moderator: Maybe one more for you, Jamie, before bringing Peggy back into the conversation. You put up some nice advertising growth last quarter. You’ve seen the evolution of your advertising business on the platform. Talk a little bit about what you learned as advertising has scaled as a company and what you’re most interested in continuing to scale and explore with where advertising might go over the next 12 to 18 months.

Jamie Iannone, CEO, eBay: Yeah. Good quarter for our first-party advertising business, grew 17% in the quarter. When you look at it, what I love about our ad business is, you know, we are helping sellers accelerate their business, and we’re growing our ad bits in a really healthy way. Sellers are seeing really nice ROAS, a return on ad spend on the platform that they have, and increasing sales. We have the original format we launched 10 years ago, which is promoted listings general. Our CPA continues to be our largest contributor to growth. We’re leaning into new formats like promoted stores and promoted offsite on the platform, which are helping drive new growth. It is another area where we’re really able to leverage AI to drive the experience. We’re able to use it in, for example, recommendations and in search technologies to drive more relevant listings.

We’re able to use it to actually change images for promoted offsite so that we put more compelling and more compliant images out there for helping our sellers do it. You know, they do promoted offsite, which is buying advertising on third parties like Google through eBay. They do it because they’re able to leverage all the expertise, all the AI that we’ve driven. We rolled out a new dashboard for our sellers, which every day gives them AI-based recommendations about ways to adjust their campaigns or their strategies to help drive more sales on the platform. We feel really good. We put a medium-term target out there of 3%, not a ceiling, but we feel like we’re progressing very nicely to that. I continue to see a long runway of opportunity for advertising on the platform, especially given the ROAS that we provide to our community of sellers.

Unidentified speaker, Conference Organizer/Moderator: Okay. Thanks for that, Jamie. Peggy, bringing you into the conversation, Jamie talked a lot about the growth drivers and where the platform is going. The other question I get a lot from investors is just balancing investments and growth against the evolution of margins and revenue take rate and things like that. Talk a little bit about where you see room for investments that might pressure take rates, but also things that are also tailwinds for take rates that are from some of the initiatives that Jamie maybe referenced as well.

Peggy Alford, CFO, eBay: Absolutely. Obviously, it’s always a balance. We focus first on just driving long-term GMV growth. We have seen that there are many different factors, a lot of growth areas that come with different take rates. As we sell more expensive things, ASP goes up. At the end of the day, if we’re focused on profitable dollars, that’s really where the focus is. The C2C initiative, for instance, we really saw that as an opportunity to build a lot of resilience in this C2C market around re-commerce. We really wanted to focus on attracting the consumer seller and bolstering the buyer experience as well. We’ve seen success in that. We’ve seen the GMV growth rate higher than the baseline. In the last couple of quarters, the take rate has improved as we’ve introduced both the buyer fee as well as ramped our managed shipping.

Once we finish ramping managed shipping, we expect parity to the previous take rate. That’s great news, especially combined with the higher GMV and the better experience for the UK market. Advertising is another area, as Jamie Iannone was talking through, that is a contributor to take rate accretion. We see a lot of opportunities to grow take rate through the growth of our advertising business. Also, some of our financial services products, things like seller capital, is accretive to our take rate. Overall, when we think about take rate, we actually are more interested in driving revenue rather than focusing just on GMV or take rate, just because of the different dynamics.

Unidentified speaker, Conference Organizer/Moderator: Very clear. When you think about the conversion of revenue on the platform into operating profit, maybe the same sort of question. How do you, as a team, think about the key strategic priorities that are necessary to continue to drive good growth on the platform versus managing the outcomes of certain types of margin trajectory, whether it be flat, rising, or not? How do you think about the balance and striking that balance in your financial planning?

Peggy Alford, CFO, eBay: Yeah. You know, what’s so exciting about our business is that when we focus on driving GMV and we focus on driving a really positive consumer experience through our CSAT metrics, we see that we generate a lot of profitable dollars to then invest in further growth. Our first focus has been around these focus categories, which we know are going to drive really great user experience and really nice customer feedback, which then is going to turn into GMV growth. We watch to make sure that the flow through down to operating profit, even if it comes at different sort of take rates, that’s really what our focus is. We’re always also looking across the business for areas to improve the efficiency of how we operate so that we can generate additional capital to both invest in top-line growth as well as return to shareholders.

Unidentified speaker, Conference Organizer/Moderator: Maybe just one follow-up there. Jamie, you alluded to it earlier. We talked a lot about how AI can be applied to the platform and be external-facing. How to think about sort of AI being applied internally and creating operating efficiencies that maybe could actually speed up some of the investments and growth over the longer term if they were scaling. Just curious how you think about striking that balance as well.

Peggy Alford, CFO, eBay: are so many opportunities. Jamie talked about some of the ways that we’re using it for the customer, which is really driving really meaningful experiences and turning into really exciting GMV growth. We also are really focused on, across the company, how do we actually use AI automation to really drive efficiency in the way we produce these solutions and this innovation? Everything from our engineers using it in ways to code, even in my department, if I think about all of the manual processes around accounting and tax and treasury, using AI to really enable automation and then redeploy our very precious resources to things that are going to really help from a value-add perspective, customer growth.

Unidentified speaker, Conference Organizer/Moderator: I’m sorry to interject.

Jamie Iannone, CEO, eBay: I was just going to say, and it excites me to see our adoption of AI inside the company. We had an AI week recently. We had thousands of employees come. We had leaders from OpenAI and all over do lots of amazing sessions. The way this employee base is leaning in has been awesome. Peggy gave lots of examples, but we had Legal up there, like everybody talking about how they’re really pushing the envelope to change how they use AI. I love hearing when our engineers say, you know, that used to take me four days to code, and I’m now doing it in two hours. When they’re pushing on, okay, I’m using Claude for this and Cursor and really kind of stretching the envelope of how can we drive our pace of innovation is exciting.

The last thing I’d say, what’s compelling about eBay is that how we build on AI for our customer. We have a huge on-prem set of data centers. We use a lot of our own proprietary LLM models. We’ve been able to do it with a great kind of financial architecture, staying within kind of the 4% to 5% of CapEx because how we’ve thought about it of making these models, training the right size models. We have one of the largest supercomputers now, top 50 supercomputers that we announced a few quarters ago, really because of how the company and our long history in using AI. We’ve been using it for a very, very long time. When generative AI came along, just the passion is exciting to see.

Unidentified speaker, Conference Organizer/Moderator: Okay. Peggy, maybe one last one for you, just capital allocation. Obviously, you know, we always get a lot of questions about the balance sheet and incremental capital and free cash flow and uses of it. Just hit refresh on what the continued strategic priorities are for capital inside the business.

Peggy Alford, CFO, eBay: Sure. Absolutely. I mean, you know, the capital allocation strategy hasn’t changed. We are first focused on driving long-term profitable growth because that’s the best way that we can return to shareholders. We’ve had a rich history of both dividends as well as share buybacks. We announced in Q2 that we would increase our share buyback to about $2.5 billion. We’ve had a 29% dividend that we’ve increased over the last six years. I think the combination of all of that is what we are really focused on doing, obviously, first and foremost with investing in growth.

Unidentified speaker, Conference Organizer/Moderator: Understood. Jamie, every year I sort of give you the opportunity. You’re nice enough to come and be a part of the conference. Why don’t you close us out on when you think about the next three to five years, what are your biggest key strategic priorities for eBay? What are you most focused on in terms of how the platform and the company is going to continue to evolve?

Jamie Iannone, CEO, eBay: Yeah. First off, I feel like our strategy is only going to be enhanced by AI. When you think about focus categories and what we’re doing, we’re only to a little more than a third of the site. We have a lot of potential left to keep rolling out that strategy to drive growth on the platform. I think secondarily, when you look at horizontal investments that we’ve made now leveraging AI, whether it be Magical Listings or advertising, we didn’t even get into financial service today, but what we’re doing in financial services to really kind of unlock opportunities for our customers on the platform, those are going to be kind of really accelerated with AI from a horizontal. From a geo-specific initiative, we’ve leaned into our UK and our German businesses, our second and third largest businesses, and their C2C businesses are much stronger. We’re performing well.

As Peggy talked about, eBay is a bit more resilient because, you know, when the dollars stretch, they look for that pre-loved item or that used or that refurbished. We’ve really kind of leaned in from a value perspective there to be there for customers. Lastly, I’m going to say, you know, I’ve been on the road recently. I was over in the UK and Germany. I was with a bunch of sellers that are 30th last week in New York, ringing the bell of the NASDAQ. I will tell you the excitement from our seller base about the new capabilities and tools that we’re giving them. When we gave them the ability to use AI to answer member questions, it was like huge applause because this is what they do 24/7, right? They’re dealing with customers on eBay.

This is going to free up a ton of their time to list more products. When we talked about bringing Magical Listing in bulk to our business sellers, they’re like we love what you’re doing, how do we do that in bulk? For example, our most popular tool in trading cards is like listing tons of trading cards because now the AI does that for you automatically. I’ll end on eBay Live. eBay Live really started as a collectibles phenomenon, but now we’re seeing it in handbags, in watches, in jewelry. It’s a new tool to give our sellers to connect with their buyers in a completely different way. What I hear from sellers is it’s fun to watch the same buyers show up to their streams. They start to recognize them. Buyers start interacting with each other.

I had one seller tell me that they feel like their core business, their non-live business, is getting better because buyers are finding them via their live business, and that’s building trust for their core business on the platform. At the same time, I have buyers saying, "Hey, you know, I was never a comic book collector, but I started watching lives." I started collecting comic books, and now he’s buying comic books on our core marketplace because of watching these live streams. What’s interesting about eBay is to see how live and our core business interact in a new way. It’s another example of basically giving these community tools as a marketplace and seeing what they do with it. I feel like, Eric, it’s an exciting time at eBay.

I feel like I’m lucky to be CEO of this company with all this technology and this amazing seller and buyer base to really lean into and leverage to grow these new businesses and help accelerate what we’re doing from the core. We’re celebrating 30 years, but I think the next and most exciting chapters for this company are being written right now.

Unidentified speaker, Conference Organizer/Moderator: Thank you so much for being part of the conference this year. You’re always so generous with your time. Please join me in thanking eBay for being part of the event.

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