The Ostrich Report AKA: The Marketplace Podcast Week 4 (Re-Release) – eBay Turns 30: From Flea Market Glory to Missed Prime Time

Welcome back, and it's week 4 of the Ostrich Report. Hendrik, did you think we'd make it this far, or would we be cut off at our ankles?

Um, Vinny, why are you asking me this? We have a whole first season to do. So 4 is 4 is 4 is 4. We should be doing more than 4.

It's amazing. My kids, they heard me on the TV and they heard you by extension, so they know you. And I was trying to explain to them how tall you are, they couldn't really grasp it, but it was amazing for them to hear us through Spotify. And yeah, we have a fully fledged podcast, we're up into the tens of listens. We see people in their droves watching us on YouTube. And checking us out on Spotify. It's pretty impressive, I must say. I am happy.

And that's, that's why we do this.

Yeah. And look, we, we want to kind of progress things along now. We've talked about here either marketplace and where they come, came from. I think it's, it's important now that we highlight some of them. And on the last episode, we said we'd dig in on eBay. To dig in on something like eBay is not a small task. I don't know how far we're going to get with it today, but we're going to try and fit as much in as we can. To understand eBay, you have to understand e-commerce, and to understand e-commerce is to understand eBay. But I want to go back because eBay has got such a kind of romantic place in both of our minds. So we have got to try and live up to the romance but don't believe the hype, and we've got to give a very honest view on where we think it's at. But I just want to go back for those people who don't know. eBay has this founder story, uh, Pierre Omidyar who wanted to sell a broken laser pointer, and he's trying to figure out how on earth do I do this. And this is like 25 years ago, so eBay celebrated their 25th birthday last year, um, and he, he, he knew that someone would want it, and he put up an ad on the internet, and eventually, uh, someone stumbled upon it and found the ad and said, you know what, I'd like to buy the laser pointer from you. And The very first thing that they had to decide to do was if we were going to have a transaction, how do I know you're going to send it to me? Because they're coast to coast is what they were going, uh, East Coast, West Coast market. And how do I know you're going to send me the money for, for sending it? Because back then it was dealing in things like bank drafts and traveler's checks and, um, you know, general checks as well. So the payment methodologies were fairly primitive, to say the least. But what I loved about it was he believed enough in the person through communication to understand that this guy actually, his hobby was collecting broken laser pointers. And so became the very first value that you learn when you walk in the door on eBay, which is everybody is good. Your default mode is to trust a person, not to not trust them. And I think it's really important that we establish that because it is to this day, for better or worse, the fundamental value that that prevailed in eBay. And trust and reviews have become such an important tenet when we think about e-commerce in general. And yeah, I look back there, I think there's something in the fact that Pierre had this founder story, and it adds to the romance of where eBay sits in, in our head. Hendrik, what do you think?

So I think what you've just described is it almost feels like, you know, a relic of the past. And I mean that in all the nicest way I possibly can. Companies are no longer founded to solve a need, or maybe I'm generalizing here vociferously, but in the, in the, in the, in the last 25 years, I think more companies are being founded to find product-market fit than rather trying to solve a specific problem. Um, I famously ask a very simple question when I look at startups, and that is, especially in the e-commerce space, what problem are you solving?

So, um, sorry, Andrew, how many people can answer that question immediately knowing what problem they're solving to you? And like in general terms? 9 out of 10? 6 out of 10? What number?

If you're giving me to give you a score out of 10, it's, it's somewhere between 4 and 5 out of 10. Wow. And that generally for me is a signal of potential troubles down the line. But I want to go back to, um, the Pierre story. One thing that I think we shouldn't forget is We are 26 years post-1999, and one of the biggest challenges that commerce still really hasn't solved is the trust situation. So when you tell me that eBay had the, you know, we believe in people and, you know, all people are good, and, and, you know, though, that's, that's thinking that in the current capitalistic world, I, I, I just don't see, um, and in, in most cases, most of these marketplaces that we will talk about, not today but in coming episodes, in most cases they're having to build tools to kind of solve for people doing naughty stuff to harm others or to gain sales or to do, you know, black hat stuff. But I think to to just— no other marketplace for me has a founder story like eBay, because it just— this is— this was what's at the time. And I think the P2P situation was great in 1999 But 26 years later on, I don't think the world— yes, some platforms use auctions. Yes, I know of Whatnot, don't come after me. But in most cases, when I talk about marketplaces, I think of full-priced items, I think of brands, I think of, you know, organized retail. Ebay at the time focused on exactly the opposite.

Okay, can I take it like a cue there? Because the founder story is important, but it's also the foundation of how management came into Ebay. And we've studied this as well. A lot of the, the leadership team across Ebay globally have taken up very senior roles in e-commerce in general, and they have been formative in Many other organizations that I saw even yesterday, Jody Ford, who was one of our heads of EU in the UK, he's head of thetrainline.com right now, and he was in 10 Downing Street presenting to the British government again, um, in terms of the deliverables that they're accountable for as, as a kind of an infrastructure organization, but also setting out the future of where it needs to go and how are you going to serve a population of 65 million people. And it's just testament to the sort of people that they brought through. Now, at one point it became both a blessing and a curse, but I just want to go back to read out just some of the, those formative stories. So Pierre sold the laser pointer to a Canadian guy called Mark Fraser, purchased it for $14.83, and they communicated beforehand to figure out what it was, the reason for buying, what was the motivation. And Fraser said to him, I'm a collector of broken laser pointers. From there, Odimar then decided to build out the platform through— or the business, I should say, more so— um, as part of his own personal philosophy. He was a libertarian, um, and he believed in creating what economists would call a perfect market. And the book that we're taking all this information from is The Perfect Store by Adam Cohen. It's a really good read, but it goes back to 2005. Um, but this vision he had, which I think is really, really important right now, is he envisioned a platform where individual buyers and sellers would meet to exchange goods without outside interference, using the auction format to yield the perfect price, the exact point where supply meets demand. Now you fast forward to today, consumers are constantly fighting to get a deal. Discounts are kind of the norm right now. Discounts are no longer a special event. And I'm comparing it to the work I've been doing on Vinted as part of our research here. And I was getting rid of some parcels earlier on that I was sending in Ireland, so most of them to France, which is really interesting. But what I realized is that the price I would list on eBay is about 60% higher than I can list on Vinted. And what they do is they give you guardrails anyway, and they show you the price range of other similar items selling for, so it doesn't make sense to go above it. It tells me something about the natural pricing for the resale market. It's better on Vinted and more aligned to what consumers are willing to pay. But isn't it a wonderful thing to hear that not only did they find a problem, but they understood the solution, which was giving an environment where supply could meet demand? I think that's really interesting, and it got me thinking about crazy stuff, which I'll try to get the two into, but imagine you went to a marketplace today where the only available item for one particular SKU was one where supply met demand perfectly at that moment in time. It wasn't fixed priced. It used information about the buyer to put it in its place and say, we know you're going to buy it. And then the next SKU comes in. Yeah. And the next SKU. But I think that philosophy or that philosophical build was really important and really formative because, like I, like I say, you're putting a problem, then you're identifying this is how it's going to exist. And it did for a long time. It resisted change. It resisted, um, the idea to move to fixed price, which we can talk about maybe later on in the show. But how, how, how useful was that auction format to eBay? And we haven't even mentioned Amazon yet, which is a natural comparison, but we can see just how different the two business models are even at this early stage. So comparing them when they got older is futile.

So, seeming that you've mentioned Amazon, I don't think many listeners or folks are aware of, but in the early 2000s, this auction format was so dominant that eBay essentially was an example for Amazon. I know of and I've read about, you know, Amazon trying to add auctions to their platform, and you know, obviously it failed. And you know, we don't talk about Amazon's failures, but if you think about the world today, and I think this is an important situation to mention, is when you, when you spoke about Vinted and understanding, um, you know, you know, selling pre-owned goods or secondhand goods or whatever you want to call the sector, e-commerce or whatever. I think it's interesting to note that a lot of the mechanics or problem solving that eBay did was— if the way that I think about it now, all the things that they created was like top of the funnel back in the day. In a sense, 25 years later on, we are seeing some of the theory as well as just organizational understanding basically in a much granular level inside other marketplaces where you just— one, you're amazed at the fact that eBay didn't do this, but also secondly um, it just shows to me once again how pivotal they are for the marketplace sector, i.e., you know, understanding supply and demand at the right time. Because in the current, you know, in the, in the new world, you know, 25 later years later on, we have various versions of marketplaces. That's a story for another day. But I come back to a simple theory, and that is— it's not a theory, it's a genuine thought— is that I don't think as a sector we understand and, and give eBay the credit it deserves for what they did 25 years ago. Um, and a lot of the things that they created, yes, some of it was theoretical, some of it was through trial and error, some of it was through culture, some of it was, you know, just things that they did. That was largely also based on the leadership of the business. And I think for me, having been on the other side of this, um, I'll be the first to tell you that I have friends who are ex-Ebayers who worked at eBay or worked for eBay in this time that we are talking of, and they all say the same thing, and that is that this was the best schooling that they ever got because they got to learn from some of the smartest people in commerce, as well as they got to experience things that were decades in advance of what others would do. Just listen to those two sentences that I've spoken in the last two minutes and then try to triangulate that, that with the current iteration of eBay, and it feels like we are talking of a totally different company.

It's interesting. Like, I've written a couple of pieces recently on it, and I want to put it in context because it's not like eBay is having a terrible time right now. There's still a major force in commerce. I, I describe her as being like a Monet. She's far away— from far away it's okay, but up close it's a big old mess. That's kind of the brand perception. But eBay still has 134 million active buyers today spanning 190 countries. And I think it's somewhere in the region of 20 million sellers on the platform as well. It is an astonishing platform that still generates an enormous amount of GMV. And it's still the third most trafficked site in North America, holds a top 5 position in each of the big 5 sites in Europe or big 5 countries in Europe as well. So it's not like eBay has fallen on hard times. But to go back on— again, we're going to keep going back in this because we think it's really important here to talk through these stories. So you had Pierre, first of all. Pierre moved into philanthropy after being at eBay. He has raised over $2 billion— I'm sorry, invested, I should say— over $2 billion with his wife Pam in various nonprofit organizations. Even your dog is happy with that kind of a statement. And they have a $400 million public-private partnership in 2025, and they are trying to make sure that AI serves democratic interests. That means democracy in general, not a side of government. Um, and then after that, you had Jeff Skoll, who was probably like the architect of how eBay grew. Now, again, contextually, this was at a time when cross-border wasn't really happening. eBay built this global platform And I remember when we worked there, I was employee number 2 to go meet a customer. And when we were asked by JD Sports or Argos, like, how do we sell into Europe? Or how do we get an improved checkout? It became really evident really quickly that the platform itself, the underlying architecture, was incredibly flimsy. And if we made a change today in England, we didn't know what it was going to do to the checkout in North America or China or Japan or Australia or whatever that was going to be. But Sculley, like Odomar, was someone who had a vision and had this kind of almost moralistic compass when it came to how he wanted a company to grow. Some of his work since being on eBay was getting into media and the production of movies. And he was part of the production team that had the movie Spotlight uncovering the abuses in the Catholic Church. Other similar kind of movies there. And he recently just shut that down, I think. But he had this moral compass. And my final point in this, because then I want to get into the commercialization of eBay, because it was really then that the wheel started to change. But we had a leader in Europe who was magnificent. At the time, we felt like he was stifling us. But Patrick Hedden, or Heaton depending on what way you pronounce it, was our leader of Europe. And he wanted eBay Europe to have a different moral compass to eBay North America, because at the time we were going through a huge change. We were bringing on brands and enterprises into the casual seller world. So we are forcing the footprint to be a total auction model to fixed price. And one of the things he did, which we found hard to swallow at the time, but in retrospect it was amazing, was he didn't allow us to sell Grand Theft Auto. There was another, I think it was World of Warcraft or one of those sorts of games. And he wouldn't allow adult toys. To be sold on the European platform because he felt they didn't have a place in the infrastructure. Now, today that would be seen as some sort of autocratic ruling over an organization, but he was trying to give it somewhere that he felt that it could land. And the game thing was really interesting because we could have changed the perception at the time of what eBay was, at a time when gaming was something you did at home, but you had to purchase the CD or the DVD to get it back to your house. Work on it, and people were very loyal to where they bought it, and getting the first step on everybody else was always key to winning that category for, for any particular season. He said no to it. He didn't want kids to have access through his platform to games that could potentially be outside of their, their, their age range, which I thought in retrospect that was brilliant. And I'd love to see more of that leadership today that you're guided by it and Then eBay went into growth mode a little bit, or at least, you know, when Meg Whitman started getting involved in the business around March 1998. Company had just under 30 employees, 500,000 registered users, and about $4.7 million in revenue. Under her leadership, when she left in 2008, eBay had over 15,000 employees, which is around about the number it has today, $7.7 billion in revenue, and she had gone trans— and supported the transformation of this auction site into a global marketplace. That doesn't happen by accident. I mean, I, I think the philosophical piece is really important to how eBay used to behave. Then we get into this new age of commercialization and we see this new type of leader coming in. What were the changes that were happening in marketplaces around that time in general as well? Hendrik, you were very close to things like Giddy Giddy or Tradera was out there in the Nordics. We, we had other competitors that were creeping in, um, maybe in Poland and other places like that. What was, what was happening in marketplace? Were there eBay employees now leaving and starting up their own businesses, or did they create this dynamic pre-Shopify ecosystem of technology companies that felt they could leverage what was happening in front of them? Only 14 questions to answer there. Make it easy for you.

Only 14. I actually thought it was like— yeah, um, so let's, let's just, let's just for a moment, just take a moment. I don't think most people in our sector understand. Just give me a minute.

Oh, we can go on a hard edit on this one. It's okay.

No, it's fine. It's so Ask the average e-commerce executive today who Meg Whitman is, and I doubt if 3 or 4 people out of a group of 10 would be able to give you the answer. I know she's since done a variety of other things, you know, was interested in politics and all those such things, but she runs the governor, I think. Yes, so Whitman, for me, Meg Whitman, I believe, is the architect for me of the glory days of eBay. One, she understood that, one, she had to get the best business people to work for eBay, and whether those people were from Europe or from other markets, they got them. Secondly, I also believe that this is the, the era in which we begin to see the unraveling of eBay. Now just before we—

you know, I joined in that year. Is that what you're getting?

I know, but I'm just— I know, but I'm just saying, connecting the dots. So, so unraveling, I mean, is eBay was starting to see internally, I believe, certain challenges based on its model, things that in hindsight 20 years later have been solved with other businesses or other technology. One, two, I think over the next decade eBay starts to lose a variety of senior executives going to other companies. Um, at that, in this specific era, I remember if you work, you work for eBay and you were a CFO, you were basically a target for companies wanting to to become publicly listed. They hired those CFOs, um, because that was like what the, the financial world wanted to see from them. But I think also the thing that never gets spoken about this, and I'll, I won't dwell on this too long, is I also think that at the end of this era, of the Whitman era, I think there was a lot of personalities inside eBay that were either looking after the self-interest or they were interested in becoming the head honcho at eBay.

So it was an interesting time, and you put it in context again of we were on the, the cusp of a global meltdown, right? So financial markets were shot. There was a lot of money then flooding into e-commerce despite all of this. EBay was a great training ground during all of that. And I was working there under Laurie Norrington, who was incredibly supportive of the continued commercialization of what we do. Very strong leader for us. But at the same time, there's this talent loss. And you've said to me numerous times, and Rick, like StockX should not exist. eBay should not have this competitor if they're doing their job right. And StockX is a great example of people who were leaving during that era that have now gone on to develop companies like StockX. And I think that's something that they failed to recognize. And there was other things going on in there. eBay was innovating actually really, really well at that time. And we did— the structures weren't there to make sure that it was going to scale in the right way. Great example is people— daily deals was a thing that started when a buddy of mine— I believe we've gone to enormous lengths to try and figure out if this is 100% true, because pre-Groupon, pre-any of those guys, there's a guy worked with me, Sean Douglas, works in now he's Chief of Staff, I think. He was working with Argos and they were looking at the eBay UK homepage and someone said to him, we have 400 Tom Toms that we want to get rid of. Can you help us shift them at all? And they were looking at the homepage and said, why do Vodafone have this ad there? And he said, oh, they've paid tens of thousands to have that spot because of all the traffic, they get a lot of clicks, et cetera, et cetera. And he said, what if we were able to use that to sell our product? And he put out the feelers to try and figure out who's the person that controlled this panel and got onto Bertie, the guy who ran it. And was able to secure it for a day for a test. And we thought, like, what, what's the worst that happened here? I mean, this goes on for a day, they don't sell anything, at least we've tried, we served the customer, we didn't do anything. They sold out 400 units in about 42 minutes. By the, by the time the 42 minutes had passed, someone in Argos had called them up and said, hey, we just found another 300, can we do this again tomorrow? And so on and so forth. And out of that, that came this display portal, which became the Daily Deals program on eBay, which has become way too saturated and so on and so forth. But it became this prime locator, and some of the amazing deals that went through just on that were mind-blowing when I think about it. But in all of that, the risk that was running here was how do we still satisfy for our sellers and how do we satisfy for customers. Now, we talked at the top about trust. Trust was looked at kind of differently in eBay because you couldn't look at it just through the feedback system. And for those who weren't familiar, you, you used to give a 5-star rating on communication, postage and packaging, time, postage and packaging cost, and the thing called item as described. Because you remember you're selling something secondhand or pre-loved as they call it today. So the idea at the time was you take a photo of the defect, you position it, you send it to somebody. If they weren't happy subjectively, they could leave you feedback. This is probably where the biggest challenge came to the trust system that I can just decide I don't like it because it doesn't match my interpretation of what that image looked like. So if you don't have enough images, you don't capture. Internally in eBay, they measure this by a thing called bad buyer experience. And here's one metric I think should be circulated in e-commerce in general. And what it was, was the cost to remarket to that person who had a negative experience. And I think it was defined as, I think, 3 stars or lower in terms of the 3 out of 5. That meant that eBay had assigned a value to the marketing they would have to do just to get that person back to the site. So the more of those negative impacts you had on someone on a particular area, the higher went the BBE to get that person back. So they were incredibly diligent at pinging people and stopping these bad buyer experiences happening. This was part of the ethos, and I think it's a wonderful metric. It's better than being punitive in other ways, but it makes you really sit up and think, well, I've got this feedback. What am I going to do with it to fix the problem that I've created for somebody? And I think I'm kind of diverting a little bit now, but I think they were some of the principles that were in situ, that were legacy, that became part of the new modern world where Argos didn't really care if you got 3 stars out of 5 on 200 sales. They just cared that they got 200 sales and they were in cash recovery mode. I think it was really interesting. So the final part I want to get to kind of on history is Well, sorry, we're going to keep going back to the beginning. You got to remember, this is a show. I'm not going to keep going back and forth.

in most cases, you know, as somebody who sits in South Africa, either the item wasn't going to be shipped to South Africa or it would be available from some cross-border thing, and then you would, you know, pay through your ears, teeth, and mouth. But now, so, so that's what I used Evo for. Um, I think on behalf of who? Was that for buyer research, seller research, personal Mostly for personal, but also for, um, look, I'm a child of the internet. You can give me a website and I'll spend hours on it looking and find something interesting based on, um, just randoms of randomness. Um, but I think what you've just shown is that, with that, that front page of eBay, for me, clearly communicates looking back on it now, what eBay viewed themselves as. They were a digital flea market at scale where you could find anything and everything. You just need to have time. And unfortunately, the world's moved on. Um, people no longer go to flea markets, or they do, but it's in parts of the world that people don't travel to. So I So in South Africa, we have multiple flea markets available on the weekend. Um, but you know, the world also—

but did eBay have the most evolved cross-border, uh, platform in the world? Because going back to 2014, and again, this is from Adam Cohen's book, it says that research showed that after eBay improved its translation program— this is, this was international language translation in 2014— international commerce increased by 10.9% globally among the country pairs that were using the platform itself. And this improvement in cross-border trade was equivalent to making the world 26% smaller, which is kind of hard to get your head around. And today, at least 93% of businesses on eBay across 18 study markets export, with some of them, that's all they do is export. They don't do any home market selling. So it's still conceivable today that that you can set up your business to do cross-border trade. And for me, it's still the best canary in the mine when it comes to cross-border trade, it and Amazon, for testing the waters to see if you've got any business getting in there. But to, to kind of fast forward a little bit, I, I'm conscious now we're well over 30 minutes, uh, we want to try and wrap up this half so we can talk about where eBay's at today and, and maybe for the last 10 years have gone. But in 2015, when they reported their earnings, eBay's gross margin— what, you hear this— was 80% with an operating margin of 34%. And at that time, Amazon had a 2% operating margin. So the world has turned. We're on very different axes now. Did the fixed price market screw the world up for eBay? And it— has it ever been considered that getting into full price listing was a bad thing for them. And it was around then John Donoghue joined as well. I'm not saying they're equal, but let's pretend they are for the purpose of a good combo.

So I think we need to just say something out loud here, um, and that is that from 2015 to 2018, I believed that eBay was the larger— largest cross-border e-commerce platform in the world. I, I'll defend that thought for the rest of my life just because of the scale that they had. Um, to answer your question about the full price changes and everything, I think the biggest challenge that happened in this specific period of time was the emergence of logistics and knowing that if I buy an item from a Walmart or from an Amazon, I would get the item in 5 to 6 days. Um, it's mind-blowing to hear the financials from both companies, and it's almost impossible to believe that eBay had better margins than Amazon, yet 15 years— not 95— 10 years later on, it's, it's completely different. It's like the hair versus the daughters. But I think what's important to note here is that, did eBay ever build systems or communicate to the world that brands were welcome and people were gonna shop for brands? I asked that as a question. Because at the end of the day, we have to understand this. And your Argos example for me highlights one of the challenges that they, they have, and they still have, is that if you, if you're a consumer, you want to know that you've got access to the best prices, the most listings, and the best deals. And at this specific period in time, I think eBay was grappling with this— we need to allow brands on the platform. I really do. And I think the biggest challenge with that is, is that, you know, how do you, how do you create a digital version of a brand so that you can communicate that to the user? Think about it. An auction is a— an auction is a one-time event for an item to be sold at a given period of time that needs to make a specific amount of money for the deal to occur. A reserve price is there. I want to pick it up because whereas with a full price item with the way that the world has evolved, we have algorithms being sent into the internet from all these platforms checking pricing from everybody and anybody to ensure that they have the lowest pricing. It's just, for me, it's the model never evolved. That for me is the biggest takeaway from this period of time.

So, so I think the fixed price model killed the innovation on the platform and killed the reasons for buyers to come back because Now it's like going to a store where you knew that it was going to be on the shelf all the time. Two really innovative companies. One I'll focus on though for the purpose of trying to keep it short, but, uh, Schuh, the— there's a UK retailer called Schuh, S-C-H-U-H. They've done strategically, they've done things really, really well in many ways. They're, they're one of the high street retailers in the UK that doesn't need to be on every single high street. They, they did hub and spoke in-store or cross-store stocking with 24-hour Windows back in 2015. Like, they were doing that from 2012. They recognized we're going to use the technology to do the heavy lifting. It's like when you play football, my dad always said to me, let the ball do the work for you sometimes. Like, kick it on and let someone else do the rest. But what they were able to do was to use eBay as a channel to manage seconds and to manage store returns. So the store return might come back, or there might be a display model in a window that gets slightly disfigured, or discolored. They were then able to go to eBay and say, we have a right shoe and a left shoe here, it's a Puma sneaker, we're going to put it on a penny reserve auction on a Monday, it's going to end on Sunday night on 7 days. And you can be sure that by the time Sunday came around, there would be 4 or 5 bids on that trainer and the price would be approximately where cash recovery would be meeting profitability. And they were able to do this with a lot of confidence. They call it Branch 309.. And then very soon, I remember 18 months into it, it had caught up in terms of revenue with their core store, which is the fully branded one. Now, I still hold the belief today that you do not need a branded store to be a fully fledged seller on a marketplace. I think it's a fallacy. I think it's a bit of a land grab in terms of, you know, get a branded storefront done. Cool. Okay. But no one goes there. No one saves them. So there's no reason for someone to go and do that. And I think that innovation was killed when we moved to the fixed price model. We also had at that time, Donahue was in at this point, or on the verge of coming in for a turnaround strategy. And it seemed that eBay were going through cycles of boom-bust, which didn't really make sense to me. And other things that were happening were we had the divestment of PayPal. I think we're not going to get through today, but maybe we could start up looking at, um, on the second part of this conversation. And I think it's prudent to probably cut it short, but maybe we should start looking at the investment in— sorry, the acquisition market spree that they went on, then the divestment spree as well. And maybe have a look at the top 3 acquisitions that they made and then the top 3 divestments, because, you know, you've talked to me a lot about Asia and the importance of the purchase of Gmarket and a lot of other really strategic plays that eBay did incredibly well to globalize commerce in general. But there's also things they did really badly, and PayPal is probably one of those points that hurts them more than everything. Shopify would Shop Pay being such a big lever, Buy with Prime not really doing it for Amazon, but payments are such an intrinsic part of growth into different markets. I wonder, and maybe we can leave this as a parting question, but how hurtful to eBay's credibility was PayPal's divestment from them, or do you think the damage is already done?

So, fun, fun story.

Do it.

A month or in the time that there was the divestment, I actually was in California at eBay's campus. I, I went for a— it was a, it was an open, open day event, um, and I was in the San Jose campus of eBay. And I'll never forget, they were basically pitching to us guests at the day. Obviously I didn't tell anybody that I was interested in commerce. I just I was another layman basically visiting a tech behemoth. And I will always remember that they basically tried to use mobile commerce as the future. And all these— I think your, your boom or bust analogy for me hits the spot in hindsight. Did they need to spin PayPal off?

Um, could they stop them? It was like, was it push or pull? And it feels like very much like it was—

yeah, but one has to remember, one has to remember, and this is where one has to be mindful, is that when PayPal was spun off, uh, Donald left, um, his seat at eBay to become the chair of PayPal. So it was kind of, for me, eBay— eBay wanted to return shareholder capital, and they thought the best way to do it was to divest PayPal. To answer your question that you wanted to post, I believe, as I sit here today, with how the world has evolved I don't think PayPal needed to be spun off. I don't. Why? Because now, now what happened thereafter, then, then eBay had to start basically doing partnerships with payment processors to gain margins on margins. Vinny, as I said here today, and this will most probably break no one's mind or anything, payments is a volume game. You have one of the largest shopping businesses in the history of commerce. Why do you need to spin that out?

Why?

This thing was gonna make money like there's no— the way today. For me, this, this, this situation is a direct correlation to what we are seeing today with Shopify strategy. ShopPay is literally their business. They don't want to admit to it, but that's their core business.

Hey, we're an AI company, leave us alone.

My point is, is that the moment that the PayPal spin-off was announced was essentially the end of eBay as we know it. That's how I feel about it. I know there will people be in the comments and all over the internet disagreeing with me. That's fine. I just view that that moment is the line in the sand with a company. They, they cannot make a return.

So interesting parallel as we close the conversation today between Shopify where it's at and where eBay was. One armed entrepreneurs, the other armed the rebels, um, and both of them forgot about their core market. So I wonder, is there lessons to be learned here for Shopify? Maybe we can break that down next week. Just before we close, eBay reported in Q1 2025 GMV of $18.8 billion just for that quarter, 134 million active buyers like I mentioned earlier on, and 17.6 million active sellers with approximately 2.3 billion live listings. eBay's problem is when it looks at the mirror, it doesn't have the bravery that it once had. That's highlighted for me in your discussion around PayPal. Hendrik, tons more for us to talk to, but maybe like the ostrich, we'll go bury our head in the sand for a little while. What do you say?

I just want to make very— make it very much known, I don't care what anybody says, but we who work in the commerce sector, we must pay homage to this business because they played a foundational role in the sector. If you love marketplaces like I do and you don't want to talk to me about eBay in the past, I'm sorry, you've kind of— you just— you basically just shook me. You've walked by me without walking by me. On that bombshell, till our next conversation. And I'm most probably going to put my head in the sand now. Thanks, goodbye.

Have a good afternoon, my friends. Thanks for your time.