eBay At Goldman Sachs Communacopia 2025: Lots Of Hype, Little Substance & Some Truth-Stretching On The Side
eBay CEO Jamie Iannone and CFO Peggy Alford once again joined Goldman Sachs annual Communacopia Technology Conference serving up oft repeated hype with little substance added - and a bit of truth-stretching on the side.
Notably, Iannone is back to saying that eBay doesn't compete against its sellers by selling anything themselves.
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. We're entirely a marketplace for buyers and sellers; we don't sell anything ourselves.
That's a claim which Iannone often made during his early time at the helm but had previously backed away from while eBay was under legal and regulatory scrutiny from a lawsuit filed by the EPA and a petition filed by the Responsible Online Commerce Coalition urging the FTC to investigate the company for alleged Anticompetitive Mergers, Deceptive Practices & Unfair Methods of Competition.
While it may have been true at one time, it's demonstrably untrue now as eBay has been selling on their own site under their subsidiary TCGPlayer brand name in direct competition against 3rd party sellers since August 2023.
Liz Morton
But since the EPA case was dismissed and the FTC declined to act on that petition, Jamie apparently now feels comfortable going back to falsely claiming that eBay doesn't sell anything themselves.
Also, about that "significant scale" of having 134 Million Active Buyers: under Jamie's leadership, eBay has actually significantly lost buyers, with Q2 2025 marking the 13th consecutive quarter where they had less Active Buyers than in Q1 2018 - a fact that can't be erased by eking out minor ~1% year over year growth in recent quarters.
Note: eBay changed the definition of GMV and Active Buyers at the end of 2021 and restated both figures going back to 2018 (chart reflects restated figures per eBay's amended reports.)
Unsurprisingly, Iannone spent much of this presentation extolling the virtues of eBay's AI technology, once again claiming that sellers can just take a picture and let eBay's AI do the rest.
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...
While it's technically true that eBay launched "Magical Listing" many quarters ago as an extremely limited beta program in September 2023, the reality is that it didn't start to make it into wider circulation until early 2025 and even then is still mostly limited to smaller Consumer to Consumer C2C sellers at this time.
Disappointingly, after all that time, it still didn't live up to the hype - requiring far more manual entry than Iannone likes to let on when talking to analysts and investors.
Liz Morton
And the bulk AI listing tool isn't much better, with sellers still reporting it is often unable to identify key item details that should be easy to pick out from images.
Liz Morton
Investors would be well served to actually try out some of these AI tools themselves or read articles/watch videos showing the actual user experience rather than relying on the slick mocked up demo videos eBay has provided in their press releases.
Interestingly, Iannone's comments today also confirmed that eBay is using AI to alter seller provided images for offsite advertising purposes (emphasis mine).
We have the original format we launched ten years ago—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, helping drive new growth.
It's another area where we're able to leverage AI to drive the experience. For example, we're using AI in recommendations and search technologies to drive more relevant listings.
We're able to use it to actually change images for promoted offsite, putting more compelling and compliant images out there to help our sellers promote offsite - buying ads on third parties like Google through eBay - because they're able to leverage all our AI expertise.
Sellers were somewhat shocked to learn that eBay may be using AI to alter their images during the "Search Best Practices from eBay & Google" session at eBay Open 2025 last month.
Liz Morton
Senior Manager eBay Advertising, Alan Feder, took a question from an audience member asking how they could still protect their intellectual property rights and prevent theft or misuse of their images while avoiding being blocked in external search since Google does not accept images with watermarks.
Not only did his answer not address the actual question, it stunned sellers who had no idea their images might be being altered using AI without notice or disclosure, presenting potential IP violations and Item Not As Described issues if the altered image doesn't exactly and precisely represent the actual item being sold.
We're actually trying to leverage some AI technology between both Google and eBay to say like well if you guys submitted a bunch of pictures with watermarks, we don't want to go back and ask you to correct them, can we correct them ourselves? We keep the watermark version on eBay and then we have a non-watermarked version that we send to Google, so that doesn't get rejected.
So we're trying to mitigate that, but it's absolutely a huge issue with watermarks, logos, text, brand names...anything that's not a picture of the item just don't put on there.
Sellers aren't the only ones who should be concerned about this practice - as eBay increasingly uses AI to generate product highlights and description summaries, investors should also be concerned about the lack of transparency and disclosure and how that might expose the company to lawsuits and regulatory action in the future.
Liz Morton
Iannone also took the opportunity to pump up eBay Live, acting like it has organically grown to include more categories over time rather than that being an explicit decision that eBay has made to limit availability.
I'll end on eBay Live. You now eBay live really started as a collectibles phenomenon but now we're seeing it in handbags, watches, and jewelry and 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 and they start to recognize them...
At the same time I have buyers saying I was never a comic book collector but I started watching eBay Live and so then I started collecting comic books, so now he's buying comic books on our core marketplace because of watching these live streams.
Setting aside the fact it's dubious Jamie has actually had that conversation with a buyer, it's obvious what he's really trying to do is position eBay Live as something that will have a crossover effect boosting non-livestream sales on the platform.
Again, while there may be some truth there, he conveniently doesn't mention that any such boost will likely be small and unevenly distributed since eBay Live is still an extremely limited feature with no signs of it being extended to the majority of sellers on the platform any time soon.
Liz Morton
That bit of truth stretching goes along with continued insistence that eBay Live just "formally" launched in the UK in May 2025, despite the fact that eBay's own press release from April 2024 and archived versions of the eBay.co.uk Live page show they have been actively hosting live shows in that market for over a year.
Liz Morton
Iannone has also been making the media rounds in the last week celebrating eBay's 30th anniversary with some very bold claims on CNBC's Squawk Box and Yahoo Finance, saying "to my knowledge we've never had a counterfeit product get through one of our authentication centers."
Liz Morton
Jamie was at least smart enough not to repeat that same claim at the Goldman Sachs event where it would carry more weight, but no matter where he says it, it's clear that "to my knowledge" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
It will be interesting to see if he gets asked about it on the next earnings call, considering there are many public examples that could be given to counter his statement - like the infamous ~$23K fake PMG Michael Jordan card that was confirmed to be a counterfeit after passing through eBay authentication with the buyer eventually receiving a full refund.
While some of these truth-stretching moments may seem like small and perhaps unimportant details in the grand scheme of things, they beg the question - where else might eBay be being less than honest about their financial and operational performance?
