Sam Bright, eBay's Merch & Seller Partnership Lead, walks through the platform's scale: $9B in 2014 revenue, 160M active buyers, and $80B in gross merchandise value across 190+ countries. He explains how the business shifted from auctions to fixed-price listings, which now make up 74% of sales.
Chapters
So let's talk about eBay at a glance. We've, we've been fortunate to see a lot of scale over the years. We have nearly $9 billion in sales, or in revenue, in 2014. Over 160 million active buyers. We're going to talk about partnerships later, but this is why a lot of, a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of companies are interested in partnering with us because there are ways we have a unique buyer community that they can access. And potentially, if there, if there's mutual benefit for both of us, it can bring things to bear for them. Over 800 million listings. So this talks to the selection that we have at eBay. We actually have— we're known for our long-tail inventory. And that's why there are multiple pages of search results if you're looking for that very unique item you can't find anywhere else. It's what makes the experience of buying on eBay so exciting, because it's one of discovery as well as if you already go there with, like, intent-driven. So you can go there and say, hey, I want a suit, or you can go there and say, hey, I'm looking for an interesting art piece from X period of time, and be able to find a variety of different items from around the world. And then we have a very vibrant seller community. You know, eBay provides the forum for buyers and sellers of all shapes and sizes to connect with each other. So whether that be individual buyers like you and I, or that be businesses who buy in bulk on eBay, or on the seller side, whether that be you and I selling, small businesses, brands like Nike have stores on eBay, or large, large retailers like Toys R Us or Dick's Sporting Goods. So we, by providing a platform, make it simple for buyers and sellers to find each other and for the greatest amount of inventory to be available. But unlike Amazon, or unlike some other retailers, We don't actually take inventory. We don't take possession of inventory, which means that we aren't competing with our sellers on our platform. We're agnostic. We provide the tools. We provide the inventory. And we allow buyers and sellers to find each other based on whatever their specific criteria are. We're very international. I heard there are about 30-some countries that are represented here. eBay is in over 190 countries. And that's what makes it really exciting. And finally, GMV. Now, GMV is like an eBay-specific term. But if you think about an iPhone, and you were to buy that iPhone for, I don't know, let's say $300, GMV is the gross merchandise value or volume of it, which is what's the price point, so the sales. And revenue is the take rate, or the amount that eBay collects on facilitating that purchase. So we did over $80 billion in GMV in 2014. All this to say that over the course of our existence, we have actually not just evolved from an auction site, where everyone kind of thought of us as doing auctions. Now 74% of our business is fixed price. A lot of people still think we do auctions, which we do. But a lot more of our business is Buy It Now than it was in the past. We've become— we've brought a lot of scale to bear over the time as well, as more and more people use our platform to list the items either in their house, in their businesses, or rare finds that they have found that they want to share with other consumers. Thank you.
