Leading ecommerce marketplace eBay has announced its second quarter financial results for 2023 — reporting a 5% increase in revenue ($2.5 billion), along with a 2% decrease in Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV) to $18.2 billion for the quarter.
“In Q2, we exceeded expectations on all key metrics while investing in sustainable growth,” said eBay CEO, Jamie Iannone, adding that the company was in the process of a “tech-led reimagination” that will see eBay sellers gain access to a range of new AI features — including a ‘Magical Listing’ feature that will automatically generate detailed product information across product descriptions.
Some of the key details from eBay’s second quarter financial results announcement are:
- eBay revenue for Q2 was $2.5 billion, up 5% on an as-reported basis and up 6% on a foreign exchange (FX) neutral basis.
- GMV was $18.2 billion, down 2% on an as-reported basis and down 1% on an FX-Neutral basis.
- In the United States, eBay GMV was $8.7 billion during Q2 of 2023, a decrease of 3% on the same quarter in 2022; while international GMV was at $9.5 billion, an increase of 1% on the previous year.
- Gross profit for Q2 was $1.82 billion, up from $1.75 in the same period of 2022.
- eBay generated $605 million of operating cash flow and $492 million of free cash flow from continuing operations during the second quarter of 2023.
- eBay advertising offerings generated over $367 million in revenue in Q2 2023, representing roughly 2.0% of GMV.
- eBay had 132 million active buyers during the second quarter of 2023, down 1 million from 133 million active buyers during the first quarter of 2023.
- eBay had 16 million ‘enthusiast buyers’ in Q2 of 2023. In eBay’s parlance, an ‘enthusiast buyer’ is one with an average annual spend of around $3,000 per year on the marketplace.
New AI-powered ‘Magical Listing’ feature
The announcement of the full roll out of eBay’s generative AI product listing tool — ‘Magical Listing’ — will be warmly welcomed by many eBay sellers who, up until now, have had to engage in the time-consuming task of manually inputting most key product details.
According to Iannone, the new ‘Magical Listing’ tool “will make it significantly easier for sellers to list their inventory.” He also said that sellers will now be able to “choose to have detailed product information instantly populated by generative AI based on the product’s title, category and any item aspects that have been input.”
eBay has been beta-testing this AI listing tool since May (via its iOS and Android eBay apps), and the company reports that acceptance rates of its AI-generated product descriptions are over 90% on the platform.
It’s also a hit with eBay sellers — customer satisfaction with the beta version of the tool is at 80%.
According to Iannone, the ‘Magical Listing’ tool will soon be developed further to enable ‘camera-based’ listings. This will allow eBay sellers to photograph a product to be listed with their smartphone, and eBay’s AI will pre-populate the title, category, product description and other item specifics based on the user’s photo wherever possible.
Ianonne said that eBay will launch a public beta version of the Magical Listing tool with camera-based listing functionality “in the coming months”.
eBay is the latest in a growing list of ecommerce companies to start giving users access to AI features, with Shopify recently announcing its forthcoming ‘Sidekick’ feature and Wix also about to launch an ‘AI site generator‘ tool.
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