eBay Inc. (NASDAQ:EBAY) Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference Call September 9, 2024 1:10 PM ET
Company Participants
Jamie Iannone – President and Chief Executive Officer
Steve Priest – Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Conference Call Participants
Eric Sheridan – Goldman Sachs
Eric Sheridan
All right. I think in the interest of time, we’re going to get started on our next one. It’s my pleasure to host the team from eBay. We’ve got Jamie Iannone, CEO; Steve Priest, CFO.
Jamie, Steve, thanks so much for being part of the conference again this year.
Jamie Iannone
Thanks for having us.
Question-and-Answer Session
Q – Eric Sheridan
Okay. So I’ll jump right in, Jamie. To start off how about we take a step back and talk a little bit about the scale of eBay today and some of the key strategic priorities for you as you look at where the company sits today and where you want to take it over the long-term?
Jamie Iannone
Yes. Great. Can you guys hear me? Is this on? Okay. So we have roughly, I’ll take a step back for people that are less familiar with the story. We have about $73 billion of GMV. We have 132 million buyers on the platform. And we look at the scale of eBay, we operate in 190 different countries. When I came back as CEO a little over four years ago, we refactored the company to really be focused on non-new in season. So used, refurbished or out-of-season new, that’s about 90% of what we sell on the platform. And it gives us a really unique value proposition because we’re really going after enthusiast buyers on the platform. These are about 60 million people that buy 70% of what’s on the platform. And one of the great things about eBay is we’re really focused on reinventing the future of e-commerce for enthusiasts, centered around three pillars. One is relevant experiences. So we’ve been on this march to drive category by category. We call it our focus categories, a leading customer satisfaction experience for what’s needed to really win in that category. We’ve also been working on tailoring all of our communications, building really hyper personalized relevant experiences for our customers, whether that be forms of payment, advertising for sellers, et cetera. The second Eric is scale, leveraging the scale of that massive platform to do things like build a really robust payments business, driving different forms of payments. We’ve most recently added seller financing to allow our sellers to get working capital from the platform, already done millions of dollars on that, scale through advertising, scale through international shipping, et cetera. And then the third is what I call magical innovation, and that’s really leveraging things like generative AI to create next-level experiences that take all of the friction out of the experience on eBay and make it really simple to unlock the TAM that exists across C2C and B2C. That strategy is working really well for us. You saw it in last quarter’s numbers. And you’ve seen it in what we’ve done in terms of focus categories and the platform. They’re now growing 4% even in this dynamic macro environment.
Eric Sheridan
Okay. I want to pick up on the last point. When you were here last year, you demonstrated some of the AI things that you were working on here at the conference. We had a video presentation as part of it. So sticking with that last theme, can you talk a little bit about your vision around AI and the type of innovation that’s happening today at eBay and what you want to sort of build from an innovation momentum standpoint in the years ahead?
Jamie Iannone
Yes. AI is not new to eBay. When you think about you know we have 2.1 billion listings at any one time on the platform, you need AI to run risk models, to run search, to run advertising, et cetera. But what generative AI has done for us is really allow us to look at things like our selling experience and create a whole new game-changing experience on the platform. So we have a product called Magical Listings. Now for 100% of consumers, you can put in what you’re trying to sell and we’ll write the description for you. You no longer have to do that. You can take the picture on anything. No need to get a photo rig or go anywhere. Take it on this ugly carpet and you can put it on a beautiful basketball floor, a pair of sneakers, look great and have it be really compelling. Our newest experience actually just figures out what the product is. This is the one that we’re testing and scaling up right now. So we’ll you know you just put your camera in front of a trading card and we’ll tell you that’s a Steph Curry Prizm 209 from his rookie year et cetera. We’ll tell you how to price it. And that’s a real game changer. Because when you think about it, the average household has $4,000 of items that they could sell on eBay and less than 20% of that is online. I bet each of you could go home today and say, I could probably put that on eBay. I haven’t used that in forever. But you’re like, well, that could be a lot of work, and I’ve got to go write a description or I’ve got to go figure this stuff out or whatever. And so our goal is to make that so easy that all of that inventory gets unlocked. And that’s what we’re seeing happening on the platform. And that’s just one example. We have a fashion business that’s over $10 billion. And frankly it’s kind of hard to shop fashion. Up until last quarter, you couldn’t even save your sizes of what you shop for on the platform. So we’re building a whole new set of features and fashion, things like being able to save what all your sizes are, we’ll give you recommendations just to look. We’ve never really had inspiration in fashion. Now we’re starting to launch things like Shop the Look. So based on your style and your sizes and all the amazing data we have about what you’ve bought before, we can put a lot of great inspiration in front of you using generative AI. And even though we don’t have a catalog, right? eBay is not based on a catalog, you can list anything. The power of what we’re doing from an AI standpoint allows us to create really compelling experiences. We’re launching a new feature using AI in the UK called Explore, where you’re going to get almost an unlimited feed of suggestions of what you could be buying based on all the patterns of what we know, what similar people like you buy historically. That hasn’t been live on the platform before in part because of the vast nature of what we sell. And what we’re finding is that these AI things really resonate with our customers. They come to eBay and they say, wow, this is a completely different eBay in terms of how I sell or how I buy. I could go on and on about how we’re using it in customer service. You can get instant recommendations back via AI of answers to your questions and testing there. And that’s all just on the customer-facing side of what we’re doing. Then you look internally and say, we’re changing how we work as a company using generative AI. So take a customer support agent at eBay. Sellers used to write really long e-mails about whatever their issue was writing in and someone would read those e-mails and go through it. We know what’s really good at reading e-mails, generating response and generative AI. So that’s changing how we work. Our engineering team, when you think about coding, almost all of our engineers are now using copilot tools to write code, and it’s helping us increase the velocity of what we’re doing and what we’re driving there. Even our legal team, every team at eBay, is figuring out how do we change how we work. So Eric, I feel lucky to be CEO of this company because eBay has so much rich data over its 29-year history from tens of billions of listings and images and data of what 132 million people do. We have all of these rich categories like fashion, parts and accessories. So in parts and accessories, we’re using AI to tell you based on this code that comes up in your car, these are the parts on eBay that you need to go fix your car, saving you tons of money. And so to be able to work category by category to build these horizontal experiences like Magical Listings and Explore, I think, are really going to be a game changer for us in the future of what we’re going to be able to do from an experience standpoint.
Eric Sheridan
Thanks for that, Jamie. I appreciate it. Steve, maybe bring you into the conversation. I think we’re sitting here at a technology conference. AI is one big theme. The other big theme is the state of the consumer. Why don’t you give us your view on where the current consumer landscape sits and how you might characterize what you see in a market like the US compared to some of the international markets you operate in?
Steve Priest
Yes. Thank you, Eric, and thanks for having us again. Just to set some context for the audience. For the $73 billion of GMV that Jamie talked about our three biggest markets generally about 75% of that, the US, the UK and Germany. We’ve seen a rather challenging and dynamic macro environment for a number of quarters now. I think it’s particularly significant in Europe, certainly for the UK and Germany, where the consumer has been pressured elevated levels of inflation, elevated interest rates, really having an impact on those consumers from a discretionary spend standpoint. The US has been somewhat more resilient that we’ve seen over a number of quarters. However, if you look under the hood, certainly when it comes to discretionary spend and then certainly for those consumers that are less affluent, they are continuing to see pressure. And so whether it’s in Europe, whether it’s in the US, we are seeing consumer sentiment continue to be pressured and that impacts it. On the flip side, let’s say eBay does benefit from the fact that 90% roughly of what we sell is non-new in season. 40% of everything that’s traded on our platform is either used or refurbished which not only benefits the consumer from getting a great source of value and trust on the platform, but also obviously keep items out of landfill. And those — that economic paradigm certainly helps us. The other thing, I would say, despite the macro environment we continue to operate in, we are executing. Last quarter, we saw positive GMV growth. This follows a sequential improvement quarter after quarter. So we are controlling what we can control. We’re driving underlying health in the business and I’m pleased to see the execution of the teams, but it continues to be quite a dynamic environment, Eric, and our planning assumption is that will continue through the balance of 2024.
Eric Sheridan
Okay. Thanks for that. Jamie, I want to come back to the base of enthusiast buyers you have on the platform. Can you talk about how those enthusiastic buyers, enthusiast buyers behave on the platform? And how you’re thinking about investing or driving higher wallet share out of enthusiasts?
Jamie Iannone
Yes. So one of the unique things about eBay is the role and scale of what we do from an enthusiast buyer standpoint. So an enthusiast buyer is someone who buys six times a year over $800 and they drive those 16 million people on the platform drive about 70% of the GMV on the platform. When you look at the level of spend that they have on the platform, it’s $3,100 and it’s been increasing over time. And that shows you kind of the massive power. I mean not paying a membership fee or coming in, these people are buying thousands of dollars on average on the platform. And what’s unique about eBay is that, what we see with the enthusiast buyer is we’re able to acquire them in a category, but they end up shopping cross category across the site. And that’s a real differentiator for eBay is that cross category shopping nature. And so an enthusiast buyer will come in and say in the handbag category, they’ll buy $5,000 in handbags, but then they’ll shop and buy $5,000 elsewhere across the site, dito for a P&A buyer or a sneaker buyer, et cetera. So one of the things that we really focus on is taking advantage of that cross category shopping nature of enthusiast buyer. The other thing that’s changed is how we go out in market. So if you went back to 2018 or 2019, eBay was working on acquiring enthusiast, sorry, just active buyers on the platform, sometimes with coupons or other things. And when I came back to eBay, we really got focused on how do we go out, go with a more full funnel marketing approach and go after acquiring enthusiast buyers. So you’ll see us go out there in categories like fashion or in P&A with a really strong value proposition about what we’re doing, like authentication of products in our luxury categories. And that’s been really successful for us. We’ve done partnerships with McClaren. We just did a big launch with the Met Gala. In the UK, we’ve been sponsoring a ton of different fashion area products. And that’s been really resonating and that upper funnel has allowed our lower funnel to work better. And so that strategy of going out and marketing and finding enthusiast buyers bringing them onto the platform, cultivating experiences for them to get them to repeat on the business. I’m a huge believer in CSAT. I bonus the whole company on CSAT because if you think about the power of eBay, 29 years back, eBay is so powerful because of word of mouth. And what is CSAT or MPS? It’s word of mouth, it’s would you recommend this. And so as we built these leading experiences category by category, that’s been fantastic for us because it’s driving so much organic traffic. We have basically mid-80s percentage of our traffic either shows up organically or for free and that’s a huge unique advantage of eBay. And so the strategy of going after enthusiast buyers continues to work. We’ve seen a stabilization of that number. We’ve seen the increasing spend that they have on the platform and we’re going to continue to push forward on that strategy.
Eric Sheridan
So building upon that answer, I think, when I think of enthusiast buyers on eBay, it always anchors in my head back to some of the focus categories you guys have called out. Maybe expand upon enthusiast buyers and bring focus categories into the equation. You’ve been growing consistently in focus categories. If you look at volumes over the last couple of quarters. Talk about some of the drivers of that growth and how you think about investing in focus categories for the long-term?
Jamie Iannone
Yes. So our focus categories, if you look in the most recent quarter, grew 4%, which was five points faster than the rest of the business. Our core categories or outside of focus were nearly flat in the last quarter, even in this macro environment. And the thing that’s resonating for our consumers in focus categories is, we’re building the winning proposition on eBay. So leading CSAT in the vertical. So take parts and accessories. It’s an over $10 billion business on the platform. We’ve been driving it at market level rates of growth. In UK and Germany, we’re actually leading, the leading parts and accessories player in those markets. And we’ve done it through things like putting fitment on there, building really great finders, having a My Garage feature, that’s personalized to the cars you own. We have 100 million garage, 100 million vehicles in the My Garage feature on the platform and driving that next level of experience, specifically tailored to what parts and accessories enthusiasts have. I had to replace a windshield on the back of the windshield wiper like the whole unit broke on my kid’s car. And for like $21 on eBay, I got the whole unit, I assembled it. That would have been a $200 or $300 thing had I taken it to the dealership. Those are the types of experiences we’re able to offer. We’ve offered game-changing levels of trust on the platform. So in sneakers, watches, handbags, we authenticate those products. We’ve now authenticated 10 million items. We built our eighth authentication center in Japan to unlock a lot of the luxury inventory that we have in that market. Our luxury business has been positive for six quarters even in this macro environment. And so category by category for focus categories, we’ve built the leading CSAT. We’re now just north of 30% of the business as focus categories. We’re continuing to expand it. We just launched UK fashion as our newest focus category and we see a line of sight to kind of keep driving our focus category growth on the marketplace. And the other great thing that happens is focus category growth doesn’t just have to help those categories. It helps the whole business because those people we acquire and shop, they shop in focus categories, but they also shop in our core categories across the business. So we’re excited by what we’re seeing. We continue to invest back in categories that we’ve already launched and launched new ones. I could talk about some of you may have read about what we did in collectibles with our partnership with PSA and buying Goldin Auction. It’s an example of investing back in a category we’ve launched a number of years ago and we continue to see really nice returns from what we’re executing there.
Eric Sheridan
Okay. Maybe we can pivot to the state of the competitive intensity in the industry today. When you look at the overall competitive landscape, how does that inform where you want to make sort of strategic capital allocation decisions? And how do you think some of those decisions might drive point of differentiation versus competition in the landscape?
Jamie Iannone
Yes. Look, we take competition very seriously and we think it actually makes us stronger. And we think we have so many differentiating benefits that if we focus on building the leading customer satisfaction in any given vertical, leveraging the dynamics of what’s happening in the marketplace then that’s really unique for us. So the first unique thing for us is scale, right? When you talk about 132 million buyers, I don’t have to go acquire them elsewhere. I’ve got a lot of the buyers for categories sitting right on the site. It’s just about getting them to shop across categories for example. Secondarily, we’re not relying on paid search, the way a lot of our competitors are to drive traffic. I talked about mid-80s percentage being organic traffic on the platform. That’s a huge and unique advantage, which makes us less susceptible to kind of crazy swings in what’s happening in the market dynamics of bringing traffic to your site. It allows us to do things at scale like eBay International shipping or Magical Listings, where we can do that across the whole business and kind of leverage those investments. We’re able to build AI technologies using open source or our own developed LLM, so do them a lot cheaper than someone competing with us in a single vertical, which may not have the capacity to do it. The second is the cross category shopping nature of what I talked about before, right, which is our CAC to CLTV should be better than anybody competing with us vertically because we can go get that buyer to buy across so many different categories and that’s a huge advantage to us versus someone else. And the last thing I’d say is a huge advantage is just our community is a huge advantage. So we’re now using new tools to unlock the power of our community of sellers and buyers. So example of that is our promoted off-site advertising product, where our sellers are doing that advertising on our behalf kind of funded by us. Another example is in social media, where we’re now leveraging our sellers to be out there. We use AI to help them build a post really easily. We post on their behalf on social media. We’ve introduced a live commerce platform in the states and we’ve just rolled that out in the UK. And this is leveraging our seller base to create all of this content to bring consumers into the platform. So I’ll log on in an average day and there’s a woman who does daily handbags. And she’ll have like 3,000 people watching her stream on the platform. People in collectibles doing case breaks. This is bringing new traffic, compelling traffic to the platform in a totally different way. And that’s just getting started. This room knows very well where those things are in Asia. We’re seeing in some categories like collectibles, fashion, luxury other areas, it really taking an interesting hold in the States and now in Europe.
Eric Sheridan
So when you think about what you’re building on the advertising side 2% of GMV now for advertising, you did this redesign in July. How should investors be thinking about where advertising can go on the back of that when you think about eBay for the longer term?
Jamie Iannone
Yes. So we’re at 2.3% penetration right now. And we’ve said all along that we continue to see a long rate of growth and opportunity for our advertising business and a huge potential there. We said at our Investor Day that we saw a line of sight to 3%. That’s not a ceiling. Think of that more as a midterm target. But what we’re seeing is that our sellers have a great ROAS on the platform to the products that we’ve launched. We are driving mainly a first-party product. So we’ve been really deprecating our 3P business on the site, which has been great for the experience. Last quarter, it was actually down 50% on purpose and it makes us less accessible kind of what happens in market volatility there. But the first-party products really grounded by Promoted Listings is driving a really healthy return for our sellers in terms of ROAS and obviously great for the business. We continue to see more opportunity there in seller penetration, in listing penetration, in ad rate optimization, et cetera. We just launched a whole new interface for our sellers. We rebranded the products, consolidated them, Eric, from six down to three, build a great new dashboard where you now get AI-based suggestions of how to take advantage of trends or campaigns or other ways where we can use AI to suggest what you should be doing from an advertising perspective and that launched in July of this year and we’re excited by the reaction from sellers to that. And we’ve launched new products. We’ve launched promoted off-site, which is allowing our sellers to market to end consumers and put CPC dollars based to work externally off of eBay as well. And think about that, that saves the seller the time from like going to hire a marketing person and figuring out how to market their store brand on eBay. Because they get to leverage eBay’s over two decades of expertise in how to do really good off-site advertising to the benefit of any given individual seller. We also launched Promoted Display. So we continue to think that the runway opportunity is great for us in advertising that we’re providing a healthy ROAS for our sellers and that we continue to drive innovation month after month to make it easier to use our ad products on eBay and to make them more compelling for buyers on the platform and for sellers.
Eric Sheridan
Okay. Steve, let me bring you back in, building on Jamie’s answer on advertising, could you reflect a little bit on the current take rate levels in the business today? And when you think about long-term drivers of take rate, maybe bring it back to things like advertising, payments, other potential drivers of take rate and what your sort of broader messaging on that is?
Steve Priest
Yes, I can’t tell you off the platform last quarter was [indiscernible]. I’ve been pleased to see the momentum over recent years and quarters in terms of how that’s been completed. And the biggest factor that we’ve seen in recent quarters has been the continued strength of third-party advertising that we continue to see on the platform. That continue to supplement with things like financial services where we continue to drive new partnerships to drive that. It’s more modest as the advertising and the other items like eBay international shipping, which is another vector where we continue to grow that? Sounds like my mic might be off. I hope you can hear me okay. So there’s a number of vectors that we continue to drive forward. As we said, first-party advertising, financial services, shipping, they’re all contributing. For us, it’s about getting the balance right. We want to continue to be the platform of choice for our sellers and at the same time, drive the right economics for the business. Our focus continues to be on driving long-term sustainable growth on the top line. For us, that sustainable growth is an unlock for the business. At the same time is driving operating income dollars and ultimately earnings. And take rate is just like a function or an output of that. Again pleased with where we are and pleased with the momentum that we’re seeing.
Eric Sheridan
Okay. Jamie has talked a lot about where the organization is going to go in the years ahead, product, platform. Bring it back, Steve, to some of the investments you think are critical in the next 12 to 24 months to execute on that vision and how it sort of informs back thinking about a margin trajectory for the company over the medium term?
Steve Priest
We’re very thoughtful about the investments that we make. And some of this is in the conversation we’ve had Eric. Firstly in focus categories. Going from strength to strength, as Jamie talked about, grew at 4% last quarter. It’s important that we continue to invest not only in existing focus categories, but continue to see new opportunities to invest. The second vector is really around geo-specific investments. You saw us lean into C2C in Germany, more recently Imperial Fashion in the UK because we want to be relevant in those markets and really look at the opportunities that we have and so we’ll continue to do that. The third is on the horizontal investments to drive trust on the overall platform, make it, take the friction out for both sellers and buyers, using the benefits of generative AI for things like Magical Listing and the unlock that provides is another great vector for investment. But then when you also think about monetization and opportunities to really leverage the benefits of having 132 million buyers on the platform, $73 billion of GMV and making the requisite investments in areas of monetization. Think about financial services and building those to the next level and the partnerships that we drive. We’ve talked about first-party advertising and the importance that, that drives in terms of monetization and things like eBay international shipping. We went from a position where US sellers traditionally would have domestic sales with a bunch of their inventory. We’ve now got over 0.5 billion listings, which were traditionally domestic and now they have opened the aperture up internationally. So you’ve got global eyeballs on them. So a number of different areas that we can continue to invest in the business. And I think for me, Eric, what I like about what we’re doing, we’re creating the capacity to invest. We’re driving the long-term health of the platform, but at the same time, we’re expanding margins. And we talked at the start of the year of driving 60 to 100 basis points of margin expansion in 2024. Halfway through the year, we’re exactly where we expected to be at the midpoint. We’ve had additional headwinds as we’ve gone through the year with regards to integration of M&A, some onetime headwinds in the likes of digital sales tax in Canada, which is about 20 basis points in aggregate. And yet we still continue to deliver. So I believe we’re getting the balance right between driving long-term sustainable growth for our business and making sure we’ve got a good margin trajectory and executing where we need to be in 2024.
Eric Sheridan
Okay. Maybe a few more for you, Steve, just as we sort of come towards the tail end of our conversation. Can you talk a little bit about your M&A philosophy and how some of the recent acquisitions that the company has done is in support of that philosophy?
Steve Priest
Yes. Overall primary thoughts in terms of deploying capital in a very balanced way is to focus on investments in the core business because we believe that’s going to drive the best benefits for shareholders and drive long-term sustainable growth. We apply that with the build by partner framework. And so we’ve done a lot of work over recent years in terms of building the core platform. We’ve done some tremendous partnerships. Adient is a great example of a partner that we work with to sort of drive the financial architecture through payments intermediation. And you’re right, we’ve done some M&A as we’ve gone forward, really focusing on the core. I think about Sneaker Con which was the first foray into authentication, quickly followed by things like myFitment that has helped our P&A category, TCGplayer and more recently Goldin Auctions, which has helped our Collectibles business in a very thoughtful way. And then we think about trust and risk on the platform and 3 PM Shield has added to that. So we’ll be continue to be opportunistic as we have been over recent years. And this is really adding to the overall health on the platform. We’ll also think, obviously, about the balance sheet and the benefits that comes from that. But I think our acquisition strategy has worked tremendously well over recent years and quarters.
Eric Sheridan
Okay. One follow-up on equity stakes. You sold a part of your portion of Adevinta earlier this year. You still do have a large portfolio of minority equity stakes. What’s your main messaging to investors about those minority equity stakes?
Steve Priest
We’ve got a tremendous track record of returning capital to shareholders. If I take a step back, since the first quarter of 2022, we’ve returned $7.3 billion to shareholders through capital returns, which is 150% of our free cash flow over that period of time. So a really sort of significant level of returns. We’ve done this through some of the dispositions. We continue to create value through that, you are right, Eric. Last quarter, we sold a stake from Adevinta. What struck me about that was the undisturbed price prior to the acquisition and when we ultimately sell that stake, it elevated by about 50%. So again creating tremendous shareholder value for our investors. I would say with regard to Adevinta, there has been some public disclosures that come out with regard to clearing potentially regulatory issues from the consortium. Filings happened last week in Germany and Austria. Obviously, we have little control over that in terms of what ultimately happens, but there will be certain things in the news wise associated with that. But overall we’ve been very thoughtful and very pleased with the returns that we’ve generated for shareholders as we thought about those investments that we’ve had on the balance sheet and monetizing them for long-term shareholder growth.
Eric Sheridan
Okay. Last topic for you, Steve, a broader messaging on how you think about leverage on the balance sheet striking the right balance there, making sure you make those organic investments you talked about earlier, while also potentially returning capital to shareholders. How do you strike that balance in the years ahead?
Steve Priest
I think that’s the beauty of eBay. We have a very strong financial architecture. We have sort of best-in-class margins. We have a best-in-class balance sheet. It affords us the benefits to do what we need to do with regards to driving investments for the core business and driving those returns. As we think about core philosophies around the balance sheet, I think about it in three things. One is maintaining the BBB+ line in terms of investment grade. Secondly, gross debt to EBITDA in the 3.0 zone and then EBITDA to net in 1.5 times. And so broadly, we’ve been in line with those. Obviously, we benefited from the influx of cash last quarter with the $2.4 billion from Adevinta that will get tax affected as we pay our taxes associated with that next year. So slightly elevated on the net debt to cap sorry the net debt-to-EBITDA side of things. And our gross leverage is sitting at about 3.2 times. As you look at the guide that we’ve given for the full year, you should expect that to come back down to our targeted levels of about 3.0 for over the forthcoming quarters. But overall very pleased with the balanced approach we’ve got to capital allocation at eBay. And I think, as I say, it’s driving longer-term growth on the platform and also making sure that we’re driving the requisite capital returns to shareholders.
Eric Sheridan
Okay. Jamie, we’ve got about a minute or two left. Bring us home. You’ve talked a lot about product, platform, strategy for the long-term. What are you most excited about with respect to eBay when you look out over the next three to five years?
Jamie Iannone
Yes. I think what I’m most excited by is just the increasing level of TAM given where we’re focused. If you actually look at a couple of years, we believe the TAM in non-new in season where we’re focused is actually going to grow faster than new in season. And that’s driven by a couple of things. One is, when you think about the younger consumer, they’re much more concerned about sustainability than older demographics. And so pushing for used fashion, for buying refurbished instead of new, et cetera, is a theme that’s happening. It’s very strong in Europe and increasingly strong in the US as well with that demographic. In addition, governments are pushing for more sustainability. In Europe, you see regulations like a seven-year right to repair or that brands can no longer throw out their returns because of what it does for the environment. And so eBay is leaning into this tailwind that is incredibly exciting. And the reason we believe that TAM is so large is because when you look at what’s available there, the number of products that a brand could sell refurbished that a consumer could unlock from their basement, from their house, et cetera. It’s a massive opportunity for us as a platform. And so we’re leaning into that opportunity in a really big way. You go back 15 years and brands were like, do I work with eBay, what should I do, et cetera. Fast forward today, most of the, a lot of these brands are selling direct on the platforms. We have a direct from brand program. When you look at refurbished, these are brands that come right on, sign up and start selling their products on the platform or they do it through authorized resellers. We bought a company, based out of Milan, that does actually authentication for fashion products with higher end fashion brands and that’s been performing well because brands now have a solution for the sustainability because their consumers are pushing their brands as well and saying, what is your sustainability solution, and eBay is a great opportunity. So that whole opportunity of TAM is probably the biggest thing that excites me, Eric. But the second is we’re just getting started with what’s capable with generative AI and we’re really unique in that, the size and scale of the data that we have, given our history is really compelling. We’re in so many different categories. We have five categories that are over $10 billion. Fashion, electronics, collectibles, home and garden and vehicles, parts and accessories. And so when you think about all the ways that we can change those experiences for future customers using generative AI, it’s incredibly compelling to think about the unique advantages of scale that we have. And so when we think about putting those two together, we’re very excited. Lastly, I’d say as you see that our strategy is working, right. You see even in this dynamic environment where we’ve had negative e-commerce in UK and Germany for the past couple of quarters, a strained consumer in the US, eBay is performing well based on the strategy that we’ve laid out and we’re just getting started. We’re only at 30%, just north of 30% with focus categories. We’re at the earliest stages of how we’re working on these technology innovations. So I feel lucky and excited to be part of eBay at this point in time with those kind of tailwinds behind us. And thank you for your time here today. And thank you, Eric, for having us at the conference.
Eric Sheridan
Jamie, Steve, thanks so much. Please join me in thanking eBay for being part of the conference this year.