AI Hype, C2C & Collectibles Struggles & Livestream Lag: What eBay Didn't Say At 2025 Shareholder Meeting
eBay held their annual shareholder meeting on June 25, 2025, taking up important issues such as the election of directors to the Board, approval of named executive officer compensation, and two stockholder proposals as well as providing a recap of 2024 business performance to investors, but lingering questions about AI hype, C2C and collectibles strategies and more go unanswered.
A replay of the meeting can be found here:
CEO Jamie Iannone's prepared remarks closely followed many of the points also stated in his letter to shareholders as well as rehashing many of the same topics which were covered in Q4/end of year earnings.
Highlights from the meeting:
Iannone framed eBay's strategy as a "three pillar" approach, focusing on "delivering highly relevant experiences" for buyers, "developing scalable solutions", and "magical innovations."
He says that the trading cards category continues to outperform with accelerating GMV for 9 straight quarters.
Collectibles continues to deliver strong results with trading cards GMV accelerating for the ninth straight quarter in Q1 2025. And the categories serving as our top contributor to growth for the second straight quarter.
We've introduced features like our AI powered bulk listing tool to help sellers list more efficiently and integrated PSA population report data to simplify and enrich the collecting experience.
We also deepened our partnership with PSA through the launch of grading add-on, enabling customers to have cards graded as part of their purchase. And we continue to scale the impact of Goldin, which has strengthened our leadership in high-value sports and pop culture collectibles.
It's interesting that those statistics seems to focus exclusively on sports trading cards, not collectible card games like Magic The Gathering or Pokemon - allowing Jamie to completely sidestep any mention of the recent developments at subsidiary TCGPlayer.
eBay claims TCGPlayer has been losing money ever since they acquired it in 2022, citing financial considerations and a need to get the business to break even as the supposed reason for their recent announcement they are closing the Syracuse, NY authentication center and moving those operations to a new location in Kentucky next month.
However, the 200+ workers who are being laid off as a result of the decision say the move was just the final, desperate act to crush the first union in eBay history after the company dragged out contract bargaining for over 600 days.
Liz Morton
Coincidentally, Deputy General Counsel M&A and Securities, Molly Finn - who presided over the due diligence debacle and apparent disclosure failures in the TCGPlayer acquisition - has also recently left the company after 17 years in various roles, including serving as eBay's first Chief Compliance Officer from 2018-2021.
Liz Morton
If I were an eBay shareholder, I'd definitely be asking some pointed questions about what's really going on with eBay's non-sports trading card and collectibles business.
Next up, Iannone gushed about the supposed success of country specific consumer to consumer initiatives eBay launched in Germany and the UK last year.
Our work to deliver country specific solutions took a major step forward in 2024. Following success in Germany, we overhauled the UK's C2C experience, including eliminating selling fees, simplifying the listing flow, launching eBay balance, improving our local experience, and streamlining shipping. These changes address pain points and contributed to stronger GMV.
Clearly he hasn't spent much time reading his own community forums or talking to actual consumer sellers in the UK - if he had, I believe he would be hard pressed to find many who would say those changes have "addressed" pain points and quite a few who would in fact say they have actually introduced new ones.
Simple Delivery is anything but simple with confusion at the post office, convoluted terms for insurance coverage, difficult refund processes, and higher costs.
Liz Morton
Many sellers have found eBay Balance to be too complex and an unnecessary impediment to receiving their funds.
Liz Morton
And after an embarrassing failure to launch Buyer Fees and ongoing confusion about how the fees are calculated and displayed, many private sellers say their sales have taken a nosedive and they would prefer to go back to the old fee structure.
Liz Morton
Iannone also extolled the supposed transparency and actionable insights offered by the introduction of a new advertising dashboard for sellers in 2024.
Our advertising business delivered strong growth again in 2024. We enhanced our suite of advertising solutions to support sellers on and off eBay and introduced a redesigned first-party dashboard, making it even easier for sellers to manage campaigns and maximize their returns. These tools offer greater transparency, control, and actionable insights....
Funny - actual sellers say the new dashboard is less transparent, missing key data points the previous reporting functionality had offered.
And you can't talk about lack of Promoted Listings ad transparency without mentioning the giant money-grabbing elephant in the room which is the new attribution model eBay introduced in Germany in February, expanded to the UK, Australia, France, Italy, and Spain this week, and likely coming soon to the US and Canada as well!
Liz Morton
Of course it wouldn't be an investor presentation in 2025 without stuffing AI buzzwords into every place imaginable, and Iannone was quick to add to the hype with mentions of agentic AI, discovery tools like Explore and Shop The Look, and the long awaited "magical listing experience."
Within the selling experience, we continue to be on a transformational journey to unlock more inventory on our marketplace.
With nearly three decades of customer insights and data from tens of billions of listings, powering our LLMs, we have introduced more AI powered features like explore and a guided magical listing experience, which can now auto generate titles, descriptions, and item specifics from just a photo. These tools reduce friction and simplify the selling process to unlock more inventory across households worldwide.
"A guided magical listing experience, which can now auto generate titles, descriptions, and item specifics from just a photo."
Sorry, Jamie but even after a year and half delay, the AI listing experience does not auto generate titles (the user still has to manually input that data) and even with that manual help to provide context, it still often fails at identifying items from photos to create listings.
Liz Morton
Has he not used the tool himself or is he intentionally lying to investors about what it can actually do?
Iannone is now also finally putting an emphasis on eBay Live selling, 3 years after its initial rollout.
We also continued momentum with eBay Live, which gives buyers a dynamic real-time experience while helping sellers connect more authentically with their audiences. This format is opening up new ways to discover the incredible breadth of inventory on our platform.
Sellers are seeing higher engagement while buyers are enjoying a more interactive and personalized way to shop. Altogether, these tools reduce friction for sellers and delight buyers with curated, engaging journeys.
But in another perhaps slightly less than truthful move, eBay is trying to pretend like they just launched Live in the UK this month - when in reality it's been active in that market now for over a year.
Liz Morton
All of that plus the continued inability to eke out more than tiny single digit GMV and buyer growth raise some serious questions about eBay's long-term prospective under Iannone's leadership.
Liz Morton
Again, if I were an eBay shareholders, I'd be demanding answers to some of those questions - unfortunately, at the close of the meeting when there was supposed to time for Q&A, VP Investor Relations John Egbert said that no "relevant and appropriate" questions had been submitted before abruptly ending the call.
