EBay’s Active Buyer Count Rises 4 Pct In Q2, Pushes Earnings

Even with slow revenue growth, eBay has raised its profit outlook as it enjoys the benefit of having more buyers. At the same time, the company has been pushed to roll out new buyer and seller features and shift its image from its auction site identity as it deals with Amazon.

In terms of the headline numbers, eBay posted a top line of $2.7 billion. The result was slightly better than expected, and non-GAAP net income from continuing operations was 68 cents per share. Analysts had expected adjusted earnings of 62 cents per share.

Active buyers were up 4 percent, and the tally now stands at 182 million on a global basis, according to the company. Gross merchandise volumes were $22.6 billion, down in total by 4 percent on an as-reported basis and flat on a FX-Neutral basis. Marketplace GMV was $21.5 billion.

Drilling down a bit, the StubHub platform drove revenues of $264 million (up 7 percent on both an as reported and FX-Neutral basis). Classified delivered $271 million in revenue. At the same time, eBay is accelerating its payments platform adoption, with more than 6,000 sellers opting into the offering.

EBay noted in its earnings press release that “first-party advertising continued its impressive growth trajectory.” More than 940,000 sellers tapped into first-party advertising in Q2 to promote more than 250 million listings, resulting in $89 million of revenue, a year-over-year growth rate of more than 130 percent on an FX-Neutral basis.

The company also said that it “continued to simplify the buying experience and make the platform more powerful for sellers.” The platform rolled out pages that made listings that were previously unstructured into a “more intuitive set of product results,” broadened a simplified returns process to more shoppers and debuted Brand Outlet. New seller features were announced to drive buyer conversion such as Trending in Your Interests, Buy Again and expanded Offers to Buyers.

eBay also rolled out new application programming interfaces (API)s that will provide access to managed payments, Login with eBay and promoted listings for third-party developers.