eBay Q2 2025 Pre-Earnings Commentary & Highlights

Liz Morton

Published: Jul 28 2025 Updated: Jul 29 2025

eBay is set to report Q2 2025 earnings July 30 at 5:30 PM Eastern. Take a look back at highlights from Q2 and what's happening so far in Q3!

Leadership Changes & Corporate News

eBay announced Chief Financial Officer Steve Priest and Chief Product Officer Eddie Garcia were leaving ahead of Q1 earnings, with Peggy Alford stepping into the CFO role and Jordan Sweetnam promoted to SVP, Chief Commercial Officer.

The company has also lost VP of Design Aaron Carámbula, who left to rejoin Meta and "support the next evolution of Facebook."

Ex-eBay Chief Legal Officer Marie Oh Huber was paid ~$6.5 million in severance when she left the company last year - meanwhile, Oh Huber's right hand and once celebrated Chief Compliance Officer, Molly Finn has also departed after 17 years, leaving a legacy of legal and regulatory debacles in her wake.

The next steps in the potential ~$500M eBay cyberstalking scandal lawsuit hang on ex-Security Director Jim Baugh's testimony and alleged CIA background with new details in the case raising serious questions about historic and ongoing corporate governance, compliance, disclosure and ethics failures.

The DOJ has dropped appeal of dismissal in EPA case which sought to hold eBay liable for illegal items sold on their site but the company continues to lobby against various state efforts to increase marketplace accountability for sales of dangerous and/or stolen goods.

eBay's labor troubles at TCGPlayer came to a shocking conclusion with abrupt closure of Syracuse, NY facility and authentication operations moving to new KY location - laying off over 200 employees and breaking the first union in eBay's history in the process.

Subsidiary Goldin is expanding their Movie and Entertainment offerings with acquisition of Studio Auctions.

eBay has announced plans to shutter Israel Research and Development Center by 2026, replacing it with a new Development Hub in India.

And the threshold for federal 1099-K reporting has returned back to $20,000 and 200 items for tax year 2025 and beyond.

Tariffs, Shipping & Payments

Ongoing tariff turmoil continues as the end of the de minimis exception and trade deal whiplash create uncertain macroeconomic environment, which led some analysts to downgrade eBay ahead of Q1 earnings.

eBay temporarily paused Global Shipping Program from UK to US due to tariff woes in May, and while they have re-enabled the service for some items, lack of Country of Origin data may still be holding back significant inventory from cross border trade.

Sellers in Canada are dealing with a double whammy of delays and disruption as labor disputes and tariff confusion impact both domestic and international shipping services.

eBay UK is promoting Orange Connex fulfillment partnership, enticing new sign ups with reduced fees amidst UK government's de minimis Low Value Import rules review.

eBay's partnership with Klarna has expanded to the US, offering buyers more flexible ways to pay, new streamlined reselling capabilities, and early adopter discounts.

Promoted Listings Ads & Growth Hacking Discounts

eBay has expanded Promoted Listings ad attribution changes to UK, Australia, Italy, France and Spain, massively increasing the number of sales which will collect ad fees - and recent updates to policy pages, hint at further expansion to the US coming soon.

Promoted Listings Priority cost per click campaigns have moved to monthly budget averaging while sellers say eBay is using link shortening and redirects to unfairly increase ad revenue at their expense.

Seller tolerance for increasing Promoted Listings fees may be waning, especially after a "technical issue" caused back charging of months old ad fees with no notice and continued erosion of ad fee transparency as "sold via promoted listings" note has been removed from Orders overview page.

Editor's note: eBay added this note back to the Orders overview page a few hours after this article was originally published - 5 days after the change was originally made.

As eBay sees slowing Promoted Listings ad adoption rates on main marketplace, a new metric included in quarterly reports foreshadows potential monetization push for subsidiaries TCGPlayer and Qoo10.

eBay increasingly continues turning to legacy discounting tricks in an effort to goose GMV and Active and Enthusiast Buyer stats with deep discounts for both buyers and sellers across multiple key categories, including trading cards and gift cards.

But some of these discount offers have created negative user experiences, with buyers left in the lurch when coupons end early looking to sellers to make good on eBay's unfulfilled promises.

eBay is on a mission to boost adoption of it's livestream shopping platform, offering generous discounts to incentivize using eBay Live.

AI Updates

eBay's 2025 shareholder meeting was high on AI hype but low on transparency about C2C & collectibles struggles, lagging livestream innovation & more - here's what they left out.

eBay has finally rolled out Magical AI Listing to all private or personal accounts in the US, UK & Germany after year and half delay - but in my initial testing, the new tool completely failed to identify items from an image and offered no significant advantages over the regular manual listing process.

Users are also finally starting to see eBay Facebook Marketplace partnership listings in the wild but erroneous item details added by eBay AI description summaries raise serious questions about liability for false advertising and seller protection for Item Not As Described claims.

The AI summaries are now making appearances on site as well, with eBay inserting AI generated info in search results and on item pages too.

UK Buyer Fees & Simple Delivery Managed Shipping

eBay UK is making changes to their Buyer Protection Fee calculation and private seller payout timing just months after the initial launch got off to a rough start with calculation confusion and user pushback.

Sellers also continue to pushback on Simple Delivery managed shipping, which was originally supposed to become mandatory for private sales in April but has since been put on a slow phased rollout now expected to finally be completed in August.

The program has proven to be anything but simple as questions linger over which items are exempt, what is actually covered in cases of loss or damage, and whether the Post Office will accept Simple Delivery packages with estimated weights and dimensions.

Focus Categories & Other Initiatives

Almost 3 years after initially launching eBay Live, the company is finally ramping up their livestream shopping efforts with recurring themed shows and in person events.

But strangely eBay is trying to claim they just launched Live in the UK in May 2025, even though their own press releases and website show it's actually been available in the UK market for over a year.

eBay has moved authentication services for luxury watches in-house to their Moonachie, NJ facility as third party partnership with Stoll & Co. appears to be phased out.

Motors Parts and Accessories sellers are scrambling as new forced free returns requirement goes into effect with many questions, concerns, and confusion still lingering over which categories are affected and other key aspects of the program.

Tests & Technical Issues

eBay is testing an Auto Price Reduction featuring, allowing sellers to set dollar amount and schedule to automate lowering prices over time.

They're also testing multiple changes to auctions including increasing bid increments for low value items, extended soft close bidding, and requiring bid verification by text or phone to cut down on sniping.

And eBay continues to be plagued with near daily business impacting technical issues including ad blockers interfering with search and item pages, a major photo outage, and broken AI functionality - something the Board's new Tech Committee should address ASAP.

That's it for the eBay Q2 2025 pre-earnings highlights - catch up on commentary from Q1 2025 earnings and stay tuned for more coverage after the call from Value Added Resource!

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Liz Morton is a 17 year ecommerce pro turned indie investigative journalist providing ad-free deep dives on eBay, Amazon, Etsy & more, championing sellers & advocating for corporate accountability.