eBay Inc.

Thank you for standing by and welcome to the eBay Third Quarter 2024 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, again, press the star one. Thank you. I now like to turn the call over to John Egbert, Vice President of Investor Relations. You may begin.

Good afternoon. Thank you all for joining us for eBay's Third Quarter 2024 earnings conference call. Joining me today on the call are Jamie Iannone, our Chief Executive Officer, and Steve Priest, our Chief Financial Officer. We're providing a slide presentation to accompany our commentary during the call, which is available through the Investor Relations section of the eBay website at .ebayinc.com. Before we begin, I'll remind you that during this conference call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP measures related to our performance. You can find the reconciliation of these measures to the nearest comparable GAAP measures in our accompanying slide presentation. Additionally, all growth rates noted in our prepared remarks will reflect organic, FX-neutral -over-year comparisons, and all earnings per share amounts reflect earnings per diluted share unless indicated otherwise. During this conference call, management will make forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, statements regarding our future performance and expected financial results. These forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties. Our actual results may differ materially from our forecast for a variety of reasons. You can find more information about risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could affect our operating results in our most recent periodic reports on Form 10-K, Form 10-Q, and our earnings released from earlier today. You should not rely on any forward-looking statements. All information in this presentation is as of October 30, 2024. We do not intend and undertake no duty to update this information. With that, I'll turn the call over to Jamie.

Thanks, John. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you all for joining us today. Q3 was another strong quarter for eBay as our gross merchandise volume grew by over 1% to $18.3 billion, marking our second straight quarter of positive GMB growth. Revenue increased by more than 3% to $2.58 billion, non-GAAP operating income grew by 6%, and we grew non-GAAP earnings per share by 16% to $1.19. Now let's turn to the key drivers of our Q3 results. Our focus categories continued to deliver relevant experiences to customers and drive growth for our overall marketplace. Focus category GMB grew by nearly 5% in Q3, outpacing the remainder of our marketplace by approximately 5 points. This growth was driven by broad-based momentum across motor parts and accessories, collectibles, refurbished, and our luxury fashion categories. Collectibles had a particularly strong quarter as trading cards GMB accelerated to double-digit growth in Q3, driven by strengths in sports trading cards and collectible card games, both on the eBay platform and through our subsidiary TCG player. During Q3, we engaged with collectibles enthusiasts at key industry trade shows, including the National Sports Collectors Convention, Gen Con, and San Diego Comic Con. We expanded our high-ASP inventory through monthly marquee auctions and consignment from trusted partners like TSA and ComC. And we continued to scale and evolve the eBay live experience, feeling particular momentum in areas like trading card case breaks. On top of healthy organic momentum, our recent acquisition of Golden is opening up exciting opportunities in the collectibles world. Just last week, Ken Golden and team completed a record sale for Shohei Otani's 50th Home Ball, which sold for nearly $4.4 million, making it the most valuable baseball ever sold. Auctions for truly -a-kind items like this can generate a lot of awareness for our platform where hobbyists can shop for everything ranging from low-ASP, ungraded trading cards to some of the world's most valuable collectible items. Fashion is also a critical entry point for us, as nearly one in five new sellers and buyers come to eBay through fashion categories. During Q3, we launched a new creative campaign called Things People Love to raise awareness of eBay's value proposition and pre-loved fashion. We focused on driving relevance with key audiences like Gen Z by highlighting eBay's breadth and depth of quality pre-loved inventory backed by trust. Our full funnel marketing strategy has been instrumental in driving continued momentum in focus categories and healthier trends in active buyers, which grew nearly 1% to $133 million in Q3. One of the key building blocks underpinning our return to positive GMB growth has been our geo-specific investment, where we leverage our innovation playbook from focus categories to better serve customer needs at the local level. While many of these product experience changes benefit all sellers and buyers, we are particularly focused on consumer to consumer, or C to C sellers for several reasons. C to C sellers bring some of the most unique inventory to eBay and are typically less price sensitive than B to C sellers. C to C sellers accelerate re-commerce as roughly 60% of their GMB comes from used and refurbished items compared to 40% for our marketplace overall. Selling on eBay also creates a flywheel effect that stimulates incremental GMB as buyers who sell purchase roughly twice as much on eBay as non-sellers, with most of their incremental spend supporting small businesses. As a reminder, our first major geo-specific initiative launched in Germany in March of 2023. And more than 18 months later, we continue to see significantly higher customer satisfaction or CSAT and improved GMB trends for the overall German market. This past April, we rolled out significant enhancements in the UK for pre-owned apparel categories. These improvements included simplified tools for selling and new tools to drive demand through enhanced discovery, like Explore and Shop the Look. Since then, we have observed material improvements to key C to C metrics, like CSAT and active sellers, alongside a double-digit improvement in C to C GMB growth in pre-owned apparel versus our prior baseline. The success of our Germany initiative over the last year and a half and similar results in the UK over the last six months gave us the confidence to move forward with a significant expansion of our UK initiative earlier this month. We introduced a suite of new capabilities to upgrade the overall C to C experience in the UK, including a simplified native listing flow, managed shipping, which streamlines the domestic shipping experience and creates a new revenue stream for eBay, improved local pickup and discovery capabilities, and eBay balance, which allows UK sellers to store their earnings or use them as spendable funds on eBay. We accompanied this feature rollout with a full-funnel marketing campaign in the UK, which highlights the ease of selling on eBay. We also eliminated final value fees and regulatory operating fees for UK C to C sellers across all categories, excluding motor vehicles. We made this change due to clear evidence that European consumers are more motivated to list their items online when it's free to sell, even when buyer fees are introduced. We believe reducing the friction to sell will unlock a significantly larger total addressable market, or TAM, in C to C. We will initially monetize our UK C to C volume in several ways, including advertising, cross-border fees, and our -to-buy flywheel. In Q4, we will begin to ramp our managed shipping initiative in the UK. We also plan to introduce a buyer-facing fee on UK C to C transactions during Q1 of 2025. Next, I'll walk through some of the major enhancements to the UK experience. One of the most significant changes we launched in October was the horizontal rollout of a simplified native listing flow for UK C to C sellers. This experience dramatically reduces the number of steps and decision points for sellers, offers intelligent pricing recommendations, seamlessly integrates AI-generated descriptions and photo enhancements, and better highlights the benefits of advertising. Since launch, the simplified flow has notably decreased time to list, improved listing completion rates, increased conversion, sold items, and GMV per listing attempt, and elevated adoption of promoted listings. With managed shipping, we are completely overhauling our shipping experience for C to C sellers in the UK in two phases. The first phase, completed in early October, extended the simplified shipping experience we first rolled out in pre-owned apparel to all categories. Within the new native listing flow, UK C to C sellers now see a consolidated list of shipping options based on the estimated package size and weight. And since implementing this change, we have observed a significant reduction in time spent on shipping in the listing flow. The second phase of managed shipping radically simplifies the experience and creates a new revenue stream for eBay. Similar to managed payments and eBay International shipping, managed shipping leverages our scale and expertise to create a better experience for customers while generating incremental revenue and operating income dollars. When listing eligible products, sellers simply confirm the pre-selected package size and eBay handles the rest. Buyers receive competitive shipping rates and sellers are fully protected against loss or damage. Managed shipping is currently live for C to C pre-owned apparel listings in the UK. In Q4, we plan to expand managed shipping horizontally on an opt-out basis before mandating the program for eligible items listed by UK C to C sellers during Q1 of 2025. In addition to shipping, we launched a number of enhancements to the local pickup experience in the UK as these transactions make up a significant portion of our C to C PAM in this market. We increased local supply by defaulting new C to C listings to offer both pickup and shipping options. We created a new eBay local landing page and map view for optimal browsing of nearby inventory. We also enhanced trust, improved post sale education for shoppers, and streamlined the in-person payment process. Since launch, we've seen a significant uptick in locally enabled listings in the UK and a double-digit improvement in local C to C volume growth. Lastly, in mid-October, we added the eBay balance feature in the UK. This gives millions of C to C sellers the flexibility to use their earnings to shop on eBay, promote their listings, purchase shipping labels, or withdraw available funds whenever they wish. With eBay balance, we believe we can further stimulate the -to-buy flywheel and also reduce the cost of payments when sellers spend their earnings on eBay. Taking a step back, by making these changes, we believe we are addressing three of the longest standing pain points for UK sellers on eBay. These delists the amount of time and effort it takes to create a listing and the complexities involved with shipping. During the first few weeks since the broader UK C to C initiative launch, we've seen more than 20 point increases in new and reactivated listers and sellers and material increases in C to C sold items and GMB. We are confident that these changes will not only be great for our community, but also our shareholders. Our strategic focus on C to C should open up a significantly larger cam in re-commerce by unlocking consumers' closets, basements, and garages. Our teams continue to leverage the power of artificial intelligence to deliver magical innovations for our customers. In recent months, eBay's core AI team released the second generation of our proprietary Lilium series of large language models, developed in-house using our high-performance supercomputer. Notably, these models have outperformed public benchmarks in eBay-specific tasks like description generation, title creation, aspect extraction, and pricing predictions. Behind the scenes, these models have already been deployed to accelerate the transformation of selling and buying on eBay, including magical listings. The first phase of our magical listing experience generates high-quality listing descriptions with the push of a button. Approximately 10 million unique sellers have used this feature to date, creating over 100 million listings. Gen.AI enhanced listings have also generated several billion dollars of cumulative GMB on eBay. Additionally, more than one quarter of U.S. mobile app users have access to the next iteration of magical listing in beta. After taking or uploading a photo, this experience leverages computer vision and generative AI to pre-fill or suggest the title, category, description, and other item aspects for a listing. CSAT for this beta remains extremely high, at roughly 90%, as we continue to optimize model performance and efficiency. We are also leveraging Gen.AI to enhance our tools for our beta C sellers. We recently introduced the magical bulk listing tool, which leverages our internal LLMs to seamlessly create a large number of pre-populated listings at once. Sellers simply upload photos in bulk, and individual listings are created with category, title, and item specifics pre-filled where possible. The magical bulk listing tool was launched for all beta C U.S. trading card sellers in Q3, and early feedback has been extremely positive. In Q4, we have also begun to roll out this tool to sellers in other categories. Turning next to advertising. During Q3, first-party advertising grew 14%, while total ad revenue grew 11% to $408 million and eclipsed .2% penetration of GMB. Nearly 3.2 million sellers adopted a single ad product during the quarter, and we ended Q3 with over 1 billion live promoted listings out of more than 2.1 billion total live listings. Within the ads portfolio, promoted listings were the largest contributor to -over-year growth, led by -per-click ad units. Promoted off-site ads were the fastest growing among our first-party ads, and during the quarter, we rolled out several performance optimizations and scaled our -to-market efforts for these ads, raising awareness, adoption, and retention amongst our seller base. Promoted stores ads are the most nascent product in our portfolio, but during Q3, we began to gradually ramp these ads through contextually relevant placements at the top of search and on the view order details page. Next, I'd like to discuss our work in payments and financial services, where we continue to expand choice and flexibility for buyers, and offer new solutions for sellers to grow their businesses on eBay. In Germany, we are expanding our breadth of payment options through a partnership with a German fintech company offering solutions used by 28 million consumers. We are introducing a monthly invoice payment option through RiverTea, enabling German buyers to pay for multiple purchases on eBay at a later date, with no interest or fees if the payment is made on time. According to an eBay consumer survey, more than three-quarters of online shoppers in Germany prefer to use invoicing as a payment method for online shopping, so we are pleased to offer another locally relevant payment option for our customers in this region. For small business sellers, we continue to expand the eBay seller capital program through trusted partners. In July, we launched Business Cash Advance, a revenue-based financing solution provided by Liberis. In October, we expanded our partnership with Liberis to offer flexible cash advances to U.S. sellers. This program offers financing for sums of up to $2 million, with the flexibility for sellers to tap into capital on demand and a lot more financing over time. I am pleased to share that through these programs with Liberis, we have already enabled thousands of small business sellers access to over $40 million of growth capital. And in aggregate, across all of our seller capital partnerships, we've connected eBay sellers with over $100 million of working capital year to date. Next, I'd like to share a few ways we're making an impact in our community. eBay for Charity raised more than $49 million in Q3, up 21% year over year. Additionally, the eBay Foundation awarded nearly $3 million to grantees across the globe who are supporting entrepreneurship for historically excluded groups. I'm always amazed by the generosity of our buyers and sellers, and I'm proud we're able to support important causes around the world. In closing, Q3 was another strong quarter for eBay. We sustained positive GMB growth for the second straight quarter amid a dynamic macro and operating environment, led by nearly 5% growth in focus categories. The rest of our marketplace was nearly flat for the second consecutive quarter, supported by horizontal innovation and our C2C investments in key geography. We continue to see strong growth in our first party ad products across our portfolio and broaden our range of payments and financial service offerings for sellers and buyers. And importantly, we remain focused on operational discipline alongside our investments and long-term growth initiatives to ensure continued healthy growth in operating income and earnings per share. With that, I'll turn the call over to Steve to provide more details on our financial performance. Steve, over to you.

Thank you, Jamie, and thank you all for joining us today. I'll begin with the financial highlights section of our earnings presentation. Next, I'll discuss our key financial and operating metrics in greater detail. Finally, I'll provide our outlook for the fourth quarter and initial thoughts on next year before we begin Q&A. My comments will reflect -over-year comparisons on an organic FX-neutral basis, unless I note otherwise. eBay delivered strong top and bottom line results in Q3. Our focus categories, geospecific investments, and horizontal initiatives drove a second consecutive quarter of positive GMB growth amid an uneven macroeconomic environment. Gross merchandise volume grew over 1% for $18.3 billion. Revenue grew over 3% $2.58 billion. Non-GAAP operating income grew 6% to $700 million. We delivered $1.19 of non-GAAP earnings per share up 16%. And we returned $881 million to shareholders through reposted and evidence. Let's take a closer look at our financial performance during the third quarter. Gross merchandise volume grew over 1% to $18.3 billion on an organic FX-neutral basis. Golden contributed nearly 30 basis points to total FX-neutral volume growth and saw an exchange with a tailwind of nearly 30 basis points to spot growth. We continued to face a dynamic macro and consumer spending environment in the quarter. As we noted on the last earnings call, political news, sporting events, and elevated travel in July influenced consumer behavior. Strong execution within our strategic initiatives helped us navigate these headwinds. Focus category GMB grew nearly 5%, approximately five points faster than the remainder of our marketplace. Our momentum in focus categories was broad-based with continued positive growth in P&A, collectibles, refurbished, and our luxury category. The remainder of our marketplace was nearly flat year over year for the second straight quarter driven by cross-category shopping, horizontal innovation, geospecific initiatives, and resilient growth in the re-commer. Moving to our trends on a similar to Q2, we saw improved trends in organic traffic in the US and continued momentum in focus categories led by collectibles, refurbished, and luxury fashion. International GMB grew by nearly 2% on an FX-neutral basis in Q3, while FX was a half point tailwind to spot growth. In the UK and Germany, we continued to navigate more challenging macroeconomic conditions and lower consumer confidence while seeing strength in parts and accessories and improved trends in C2C volume. Cost-border trade continued to be an important driver of international GMB growth led by exports from Greater China and Japan into our major markets. DBT was also a significant contributor to growth in focus categories, particularly P&M. Next, let's take a look at buyers. Trading 12-month active buyers grew by nearly 1% to $133 million in Q3. Our strategic initiatives and full funnel marketing campaigns helped drive continued growth in new and reactivated buyers and improved retention. Enthusiast buyers were stable at roughly $16 million. Ben's current UGS buyer grew slightly year over year to just over $3,100. Moving to revenue, in Q3 we grew revenue by over 3% to $2.58 billion. Foreign exchange was a 30 basis point headwind to spot revenue growth. Our take rate was .1% at nearly 20 basis points year over year. First-party advertising, shipping, and financial services all contributed to our rate expansion, which was slightly offset by C2C initiatives and an FX headwind of nearly 10 basis points. On a sequential basis, our take rate expanded by over 10 basis points. Total advertising revenue grew 11% to $408 million in the third quarter and represented over .2% penetration of the Q3. First-party ads grew over 14% to $396 million and reaccelerated modestly from Q2 level. Third-party display ads revenue declined nearly 43% year over year as we continue to deprecate these legacy ad units. Next I'll discuss our profitability. Non-GAAP gross margin was flat year over year as a reduction in cost of payments and lowered appreciation expenses were roughly offset by traffic acquisition costs, tax-related matters, and foreign exchange headwinds. Non-GAAP operating margin expanded by over 80 basis points year over year to .2% in Q3 driven by operational efficiencies, partly offset by investments in full funnel marketing, and a foreign exchange headwind of roughly 20 basis points. A non-GAAP operating income grew 6% in the quarter while non-GAAP earnings per share grew 16% to $1.19. On a GAAP basis, we reported earnings per share of $1.29 in Q3. The difference was primarily due to an increase in the value of our investment portfolio, partly offset by stock-based compensation. Turning to our balance sheet capital allocation, our free cash flow for the third quarter was $646 million down year over year due to the timing of cash taxes. Last year the majority of our cash tax payments were delayed until Q4 due to California's disaster tax relief program. At the end of Q3, we had cash and non-equity investments of $5.8 billion and gross debt of $7.4 billion. We repurchased $750 million of eBay shares during Q3, an average price of approximately $57, and had roughly $1.2 billion remaining under our buyback authorization at the end of the period. In addition, we paid a quarterly cash dividend of $131 million in September, or $0.27 per share. Shifting to our investment portfolio, our equity investments and warrants were valued at $3 billion at the end of the quarter, with Arulia, Adyen, and Gmarket attending to the majority of the value. We retain approximately 18% ownership of Arulia, which is a privatized ad event entity, and our ownership is valued at roughly $1.9 billion based on the value as at the close of transaction. The consortium led by Primera and Blackstone has the option through November 29th to purchase from eBay roughly 10% ownership of the private entity for just over $1 billion. Our Adyen warrants were valued at approximately $0.5 billion at the end of Q3. On October 15th, we met the processing volume milestone necessary to vest the second tranche of our Adyen warrants. We subsequently paid $105 million to exercise the tranche for approximately 404,000 shares of Adyen stock, which were valued at approximately $602 million based on the company's share price at the time. Turning to our outlook, we expect to generate GMV between $18.9 and $19.3 billion in the fourth quarter, representing FX neutral growth between flat and 2% year over year. We expect Golden to contribute over 30 basis points to GMV growth in the quarter. Our current rates, foreign currency would represent a roughly two-point tailwind to GMV growth in Q4. We expect continued momentum in GMV to be driven by multiple strategic initiatives across focus categories in the UK and Germany and on various. Our outlook also contemplates the challenging operating environment due to persistent economic headwinds and several one-off dynamics in Q4, specifically greater consumer attention on US elections, the shorter holiday shopping period this year, and Hurricane Milton in early October. The forecast revenue between $2.53 and $2.59 billion in the fourth quarter, representing FX neutral growth of negative one to positive 1%. The current rates we estimate FX would represent a nearly 30 basis point tailwind to spot revenue growth. We anticipate our UK C2C initiative will modestly benefit total GMV growth in Q4. While certain existing levers like advertising, cost for the feed, and our sell to buy flywheel should continue to contribute revenue on UK C2C volume, we do not expect material revenue contribution in Q4 from our two major reminitization efforts. Managed shipping, which is ramping starting in Q4 through Q1 of 2025, and buyer fees, which we plan to introduce in the back half of Q1. We launched our UK initiative in October to provide the best experience for our sellers and buyers in our second largest market ahead of the critical holiday season. We also believe it is the right decision to phase in these new monetization programs to give our customers time to adjust to these changes. For Q4, we forecast non-GAAP operating margin between 26.5 and 27%. In addition to pressure from our UK initiative, expenses related to M&A and integration costs add over 30 basis points of impact to our consolidated operating margin. The following currency is another 60 basis points of headwind year over year. For the full year, this implies 60 to 70 basis points of non-GAAP operating margin expansion. We expect to generate non-GAAP earnings to share between $1.17 and $1.22 in the fourth quarter, representing year over year growth between 9 and 14%. This implies full year non-GAAP EPS growth between 13 and 14%. We forecast capital expenditure to be about .5% of revenue for the full year and our non-GAAP tax rate to remain stable at 16.5%. We continue to expect free cash flow of just under $2 billion for the full year. We are further raising our share repurchase target 2024 for $3 billion, implying $750 million of repurchase during Q4. In addition, our board declared a quarterly dividend of 27 cents per share for the fourth quarter to be paid in December. Now, I'd like to make a few initial comments on our financial priorities for 2025. We plan to balance the need to reinvest for long-term growth against the near-term top and bottom line performance. Assuming an unchanged macro environment, we are planning our business around positive FX-neutral GMV and revenue growth, non-GAAP operating income dollar growth modestly ahead of GMV, and high single-digit growth in non-GAAP earnings per share year over year. As it pertains to margins, we plan to target the optimal combination of GMV growth and operating margin to maximize operating income dollar growth. There are some unique considerations for 2025 influencing our financial architecture. Similar to eBay International Shipping Program, a managed shipping initiative in the UK will recognize revenue on a gross basis. Our current assumption is that UK managed shipping will pressure our consolidated non-GAAP operating margin by approximately 40 basis points in 2025 while contributing positively to operating income dollars. In closing, Q3 was another strong quarter for eBay. Our GMV grew for a second consecutive quarter. Non-GAAP operating income grew 6%, and non-GAAP earnings per share grew 16%. These results clearly demonstrate that our strategy is working, and we have the right balance between delivering robust earnings, reinvesting to drive long-term sustainable growth, and delivering healthy capital returns to shareholders. We plan to follow these same principles and build on this year's momentum as we finalize our plans for 2025. With that, Jamie and I will now take your questions.

Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad to raise your hand and join the queue. If you would like to withdraw your question, simply press star one again. We ask that you please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. Your first question comes from the line of a Galaroonian from Citigroup. Your line is open.

Hey guys, good afternoon. I wanted to ask on the re-commerce initiative, and it seems to be a greater focus here. Maybe first, just on the monetization efforts, how should we think about the catch-up to break even on the fees that you're giving up? Do you think that over time, the new monetization model can be more monetizable than the previous one? How do you think about this opportunity and expanding it to the US, if it works in the UK and if it works in Germany? How this could expand to eBay more broadly?

Yeah, look, we're launching this from a position of strength. Let me tell you kind of how we're thinking about it. We've delivered positive GMV growth in the past two quarters, and we have strong conviction. We started a year and a half ago in Germany and saw really strong results there. And our early results in pre-owned apparel in the UK give us the confidence to move forward. We made the decision to launch this in October 1 to really take advantage of the holiday period in our second largest market. We believe it's the right decision to phase this in for our sellers and buyers. Because the other thing you've got to remember here, Yigal, is just it's a change to the marketplace, and we want to give sellers and buyers time to adjust their processes. So that's why we're going to ramp up managed shipping through Q4 and Q1 and why we decided to introduce the buyer fees in the back half of Q1. So the pressure that you're seeing on revenue in Q4 is primarily a timing dynamic, given that ramp of managed shipping over Q4 and through Q1, and then introducing the buyer fee in the back half of Q1. So some of that remodification lag will likely spill over to Q1, but we believe that these changes are clear. We believe based on where buyer fees are in the UK, we have the ability to monetize these, moving those fees around. And remember, it's not just those two, but it's also advertising, it's the cross-border fees that we charge, as well as the seller to buyer flywheel that we see. But the strategic benefits of doing this are really clear. We're going to unlock a significant portion of TAM in our second largest market and ultimately generate long-term growth for eBay and value for our shareholders. And as Steve said, Steve gave some preliminary commentary on FY25, and as we expect to grow GMV and revenue year on year, grow operating income modestly faster than GMV and increase our EPS by high single digits year over year. To your question on the US, we have no plans to launch free selling in the US. US is a different market from the UK. UK buyers and sellers are more open to buyer fees, it's more standard in the market. There may be certain aspects of the product experience that streamline selling that we bring to other markets. And as you know, we look at each market and categories and think about the specifics of what's the optimal set of initiatives to unlock more supply and demand for that specific market.

Thanks. And like a follow-up on the second gen of LLM, you guys are releasing and some of what you're seeing, you talked about outperforming the public benchmarks. Any way to frame how that's impacting volume growth? Are you seeing it roll through yet? Is there any way to quantify that? Thanks.

Yeah, we are. It's been really great to see how sellers and buyers have responded to this. In that new model, we're outperforming the public benchmarks on things like descriptions, titles, aspect. We've seen a better job at precision pricing, increasing by double digits through these new models that we have on the platform. And what's great about the AI that we're launching is it's having a major impact at scale. So if I look at it, just since we've launched these tools, over 10 million sellers have taken advantage of it. And over 100 million listings have adopted it. And cumulatively, we've generated several billion dollars of cumulative GNV from Gen. AI enhanced listings since launch. And we're still continuing to ramp up, improve the models, expose more and more people to magical listings. So I feel really good about it. The other thing is we saw some demand from our small business and our B2C sellers to have access to the tools that we had built. So this quarter, we launched magical bulk listings. And essentially what that does is if I'm a business seller, let's say I've got 25 watches or trading cards that I want to list, I can just upload a couple of photos of each and we'll, in the background, use our large language models and the product knowledge graph to fill in all the description, title and aspect information for those. Using that same technology that we built for single listings to do bulk listings. So still early stages, but really excited by the performance of what we're seeing in AI.

Thank you guys.

Your next question comes from a line of Justin Post from Bank of America. Your line is open.

Great. Thanks for providing the framework for 25. Very helpful. A couple of questions on that. So first on focus categories within the positive GMV, is there still room to grow faster there? And what are some of the initiatives that you're most excited about? And then on take rates, maybe I know you're not going to give us the revenue growth, but some of the puts and takes for revenue take rates on GMV next year. Thank you.

Yeah. So I'll start with the first one. And then Steve, we'll talk about the take rate. So on focus categories, yeah, look, another solid quarter. We delivered 5% growth. Parts and accessories continues to be a big growth driver of our focus categories, but we saw some momentum in other areas. Specifically, I would talk about collectibles. We saw double digit growth in collectibles this quarter. You've probably been seeing a number of things that we were doing, but the combination of the work that we're doing with TCG player, our golden, which is, golden provides some of the world's most desirable inventory that's out there on the marketplace. If you're on golden right now, you see that we're doing Luke Combs and Eric Church are doing raising money for the Carolinas. And that's all being driven by our family at golden. And then when you look at trading cards in particular, we've had this healthy run rate off of it, I said, as double digit growth, really based on all of the innovations that we've done over time, like my collections, price guides, authentication, but also the grading partnership that we put in place with PSA, where now instead of sending an item in to be graded and describe it on the way into grading and then getting it back and then listing it again on eBay, and then having to ship it to the buyer, that's all one seamless process now where I just ship it to PSA and it gets sold. So we're really seeing strength across the board in all of our focus categories. Refurbished continues to do well in this marketplace where people are consumers are challenged. And our luxury has also been contributing positively to year over year growth for the eighth straight quarter. So the work that we're doing with our new authentication center is there. So we have lots of momentum in our focus categories. We continue to expand the work we've done there. And I'm also just excited because the work that we've done for focus categories by verticals, we've been able to apply in these geo-specific areas to C2C to great effect. I mean, if you look at Germany, for example, we increased our C2C seller CSAT by 20 percentage points. And that's led to a real change in trajectory of our German business versus the prior baseline. So we will continue to push forward with our strategy. We like what we're seeing.

Hi, Justin. Good to speak to you this afternoon. Obviously, we provided a bit of color on our 2025 architecture in the prepared remarks and believe this is a really robust financial outlook for 2025 and the continuation of the progress that we've continued to make this year. We're not going to provide any more specific, precise guidance around takeaway at this point because we're finalizing our budgets. But I can talk through a few factors that you can consider for 2025. The first one is on shipping. Obviously, Jamie just elaborated on UK C2C initiative. UK is our second largest market by volume and has a higher C2C penetration than Germany. And while there's this near term impact on take rate, as we eliminated final value fees for sellers, we will be remonetizing that through the managed shipping, which is ramping now and will continue into the first quarter and the buyer fees, which is planned for the back half of Q1. The second item is really around advertising and financial services. We do expect advertising to continue to grow faster than GMV, driven by the momentum in first party promoted listings and offsite ads and obviously the improved seller experience that's coming from that. And to a lesser extent, we do expect some incremental revenue associated to financial services as we get into 2025.

Great. Thank you.

Next question comes from a line of Lee Horowitz from Deutsche Bank. Your line is open.

Great. Thanks. Maybe just sticking with the 25 framework. Does the 25 framework assume expansion of focus categories next year? And can you remind us some of the larger categories on the platform that have yet to get focus category investment at this point? And then maybe just one competition. You have a scaled sports related collectible competitors with direct relationships with leagues and maybe some supply advantages there, Walmart partnering in the fashion and sneaker vertical. Can you comment at all what you see as some of the most important strategic most in those two categories specifically to fight off competition from some of the larger competitors moving in there?

Yeah. As you know, Lee, we don't pre-announce anything that we're doing on focus categories for competitive reasons. I will say we have five categories that are over 10 billion on eBay, fashion, home and garden, collectibles, electronics, and motors, parts, and accessories. And so it shows you kind of the breadth of what we have on there. We did purposefully take some of the playbooks that we've had going against verticals and put it against GOs to great effect. And we've really liked the ROI that we've seen against that. The second thing I would say is that the horizontal investments that we've been making to drive our core categories have been really beneficial. And that's because of all of the generative AI capabilities we've been able to apply. Those help both our focus categories, but also in our core categories. And it's the second quarter in a row where we've had nearly flat growth in our core categories. To your question on collectibles business and competitive positioning, we feel great about the innovation that we're driving quarter after quarter from that standpoint. I mentioned this quarter as a very skilled player in the market, we continue to see double-digit growth in trading cards. We put together a really nice collection of assets. When you think about from TCG player in collectible card games to what we do on eBay to now Golden, we sell everything from ungraded trading cards to the highest value products in the hobby. And that's valuable because collectors are generally looking kind of across that span to do so. And all the innovation that we've been driving in that category with collections, price guides, authentication products that we've launched with PSA, this new partnership that we've put in place with collectors. I mean, just think about it. All the things that we've been innovating are the exact things that collectors have asked us to do for years, right? They've asked us to say, make it easy for us to send a card in for grading and sell it on eBay. And now that's really seamless. And the CSAT on that is very, very high. When you look at the innovation that we're driving in eBay live, we've done more and more case breaks every single quarter and added new capabilities there. We recently added last quarter the ability to do buy spot, which is essentially to purchase your favorite team and track that through a case breaks. And we continue to grow it. And the last thing I'd say is that, look, we've had had, and we still have incredible relationships with top collectible sellers. And we've always been a champion of the hobby shop. It's why we did the TCG player deal. And we believe in open marketplace where enthusiasts can buy and sell the things that they love.

And your next question comes from a line of Colin Sebastian from Baird. Your line is open.

Thanks, guys. Appreciate the questions. I guess first, Jamie, given these platform initiatives, do you think any of these will convert into growth in enthusiast buyers? Or is it really about increasing spending or share of wallet among the existing buyer base? And then the follow-up would be, I guess, Steve, regarding the Q4 one-off factors, could you maybe quantify the impact on growth you're embedding in guidance from those distractions? And if we should think about that as maybe potential upside if consumers end up spending at normal levels during the holidays? Thank you.

Yeah, great question, Colin. So first off, absolutely, we see that converting into buyers and enthusiast buyers. You'll note that this quarter we were up 1% in our active buyer count to 133 million. And while that's not a core KPI of it is an output of the strategy and the strategic initiatives that we've been driving and healthy buyer funnel is important to our growth and enthusiast buyers. You know, when you look specifically at the C2C initiative that we did in Germany and that we're talking about in the UK, it's great for the buying perspective for a couple reasons. First is when we convert a buyer into seller, they become at least twice as valuable as a buyer as previously on the platform. And that's really great for buying. The second thing is C2C has really, you know, I call it the inventory gold on the platform. In general, they're bringing on things that aren't sold by a C2C, by a B2C seller or by a small business. You know, think about all the stuff that you have around the house that's not available from a B2C seller. And so, you know, when I look at the overall platform, we're about 40% used or refurbished. But in our C2C sellers, it's 60%. And so that unique inventory drives demand and drives demand amongst enthusiast buyers who find that part or that card or that thing they couldn't otherwise find on eBay. And the other great thing is that a little over three quarters of our volume is B2C, but the vast majority of our sellers is C2C. And so what you see happening there is that that flywheel of those C2C buyers, when they become buyers, actually the majority of that new purchasing goes to small businesses and B2C sellers. So B2C sellers win as well from that increased buying activity on the platform. And that's why we really like the synergy of what we're seeing overall. It's why, you know, when we look at the trends in our German business, they're much healthier than before we made these changes. And we're excited both for what it does for sellers, but importantly, the demand that it drives for buyers. You'll also see across all of our markets, a new marketing campaign that's called Things People Love. And I think we had a link in the slide deck to show you some of the creative, but I'm really excited by the storytelling, because there's both a buying message in there, but also a selling message about unlocking what's in your closet, your garage, your basement. And that's really healthy for us to kind of drive that new initiative. And it's extremely well done and it tested well. So I'm excited for those campaigns.

Hey, Colin, just with regards to our assumptions in the fourth quarter that informed our guide on GMV. First thing I would say, I'm really pleased with the position we're in and achieving another positive growth in the third quarter around GMV, our second consecutive quarter, while we continue to navigate a very dynamic macro environment. It's really a reflection of the investments that we've continued to make in focus categories in UK and Germany and the horizontal areas which are continuing to drive health on the overall platform. And as Jamie talked about, our UK C2C proposition launched on the 1st of October ahead of the holidays, and we believe that's going to provide a modest boost to the fourth quarter GMV. And we're pleased with the early results so far. Assuming no discernible change in the macro environment, there are a number of one timers we've contemplated as we think about the fourth quarter. The first is obviously the upcoming US elections. The second is the shorter holiday season with fewer days between Thanksgiving and Christmas. And in October, we saw the impacts of Hogan-Milton, which impacted demand, particularly in P&A and shipping and deliveries. So I firmly believe that our guide balances the strong execution that we've seen here today with the ongoing macro environment that we're expecting, and a few of those one-offs, but really pleased with the momentum that we're seeing in the business.

Okay, thanks guys.

Your next question comes from a line of Nathan Feather from Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.

Hey everyone, thanks for the question. Really encouraging to see the initial guide for positive GMV growth in 2025. I guess one of the one or two primary things that give you conviction that you've turned back to that sustainable growth area?

Yeah, I think a couple of things. One is the momentum that we're seeing across the board in focus categories, being at 5% growth here and kind of growing at market rates pretty consistently over the last couple of quarters. Combined with the horizontal work that we've been doing, we've now had two quarters of nearly flat, and these are all kind of building blocks, if you will, of the momentum that we're seeing in the underlying business. I talked a little bit about where we are from a buyer's perspective, but we're happy to see exactly what we thought, which was a stabilization and a 1% growth in active buyers. The other thing is that the investments that we're making in these geos are significant opportunities for expansion in the TAM. When you look at our opportunity in UK in C2C, we think there's a big opportunity to go after really a massive TAM in terms of what people have sitting in their garages, houses, etc. It's pretty significant. What we've seen in the past, what we saw with the UK pre-loved fashion and what we saw in Germany is that we're able to bring on newer reactivated sellers onto the platform and then drive that ultimate buyer flywheel. It's the combination of the momentum that we're seeing, those elements, and the new initiatives that we have in place that give us confidence to put out the commentary there about 25.

Great. That's helpful. How should we think about the economics of UK-managed shipping relative to eBay International shipping? Can you remind us to what extent EIS drove uplift in cross-border transactions? Thank you.

Yeah. It was very helpful for our cross-border trade business. You see it in some of our cross-border trade numbers. We had an incremental 400 million listings on the platform that were available to be shipped internationally. When you look at our shipping changes, the first thing we're doing is just simplifying shipping on the platform, and that's pretty significant across our markets. But with managed shipping, it radically simplifies the experience and creates a new revenue stream for eBay. Historically, when I had to, let's say you were shipping a blazer to someone, you'd have to go from all the choices and figure out what you're going to list. Then if there were issues, you had to deal with it as a seller. The buyers on C2C items only really had tracking about 40% of the time. Through managed shipping, eBay managed all of that for you and really simplifies the experience on the platform. Nearly all buyers will then have tracking information for eligible items. Frankly, this creates a new revenue stream for us, just like with payments and advertising. This is a new opportunity for eBay. It's a win from an experience standpoint. It's great on generating operating income for the business. But most importantly, it's another tool that unlocks more TAM in C2C. When we've tested this, this is now live in pre-loved fashion in UK managed shipping. Historically, it would have taken 90 seconds to get through that shipping section, and we're seeing sellers get through it in under 30 seconds. That's really powerful when you think about just taking friction out of the experience for selling. Steve, maybe you can talk a little bit more to the financial implications of managed shipping.

Yeah, Nathan, as we talked about extensively last year, there's obviously an accounting change associated with EIS and the apply to managed shipping because we're leaning in, we're taking friction off the platform, we're helping out buyers and sellers, and we become the principal. We recognize the gross revenues and the cost of shipping. You can imagine as a result of the scale of domestic shipping, it's accretive to operating income. That's really the focus that we have in terms of operating income dollars. But because it's domestic in nature and has naturally lower operating margins because of

the cost of shipping, it's a really good opportunity to get through that. Our next question comes from a line of Nikhil from Bernstein. Your line is open.

Hi there. Thanks for taking the question. When you refer to healthier trends in Germany, is that predominantly a top line comment or have you been able to improve the profitability of the German business as well now that you've got more activity taking place on your marketplace over there?

Well, before we were launching this to where we are now, we're seeing really nice improvement in the business. While we don't break that market out specifically, if you look in the 10Q, you can see kind of improving revenue trends from that perspective. Exactly what we intended to see is what we're seeing, which is that healthier C2C business with a 20% greater CSAT is driving more new and reactivated sellers on the platform who end up buying more and that's leading to the healthy trend. When Steve talked about this originally when we launched it, we quantified this as 10 basis points of impact and we've been able to remonetize that business through things like ads, cross-border trades, and we're seeing exactly the flywheel that I talked about from seller to buyer. So we're really pleased with what we saw and what we continue to see with our C2C business in Germany. We're really happy with the early results from UK Pre-Love fashion and that gave us the conviction that this was a real winning model to take to our second largest market where there's some unique dynamics around how the sellers and buyers feel about buyer fees, which makes this a really good opportunity for us to go after incremental TAM.

Great, thanks Jamie. Maybe just to follow up, you've been talking about improved satisfaction scores, which is a helpful indicator. Now that you've got several quarters behind you on various marketplace improvements, can you maybe frame how much GMV conversion rates have improved since you started on this journey? Thank you.

Yeah, look you've heard me talk forever about GMV follows CSAT and I've always said, you know, CSAT's really the leading indicator there and if you look case by case, you know, we've seen CSAT increased 20 percentage points in what we did in our early focus categories and, you know, look at the trends that we have now on focus categories growing at 5%. I would say the same exact thing happened in Germany where we had a 20 point increase in CSAT and much, much healthier trends. So, you know, what we're doing is not only having an impact on, you know, conversion and the health and growth of the business, but it's allowing us to bring on kind of new buyers and new sellers through these efforts, which is helping, you know, the active buyer growth that we're seeing is truly an output of the strategic initiatives that we've been driving and the new reactivated sellers is not only good for the buying activity, but it's just bringing on more compelling inventory on the platform, which is really good for the long-term health of the business.

Thanks, Jamie.

Our next question comes from a line of Tom Champion from Piper Sandler. Your line is open.

Thank you. Good afternoon, guys. Jamie, perhaps for you, always a lot of helpful commentary on the business in Europe, but I think China is actually now your number three market by revenue. I'm wondering if you could just give us an update on the business and your customer base there, and maybe for Steve just quickly, any impact from the sun setting of the MX payment and arrangement? Thank you.

Yeah. So look, our cross border trade business out of China continues to be strong. It over indexes to focus categories, our business there, and so it's performing well. Specifically, I would call out parts and accessories has been a really good vector for our cross border trade business, and we've continued to make that easier for buyers and sellers. So with our shipping solutions that we've had, we've helped them forward deploy, from that perspective, and we've also just made payments a whole lot easier from that perspective. When you think about our relationship with Amex, we deprecated Amex in August of last year, and as expected, there was no material impact to our business. As the vast majority of our customers on eBay, they use more than one payment option. So, you know, most customers that were using Amex were able to migrate to one of our other options like PayPal or Venmo or non-Amex, debit or credit cards, and we're continuing to focus on launching new ways to pay to -to-buyers and sellers. You know, we launched River Tea this quarter in Germany. 28 million customers there use that invoicing solution. They do like 80 million transactions a month, and it was one of those high demand areas for us to bring onto the platform, and so we did. So really pleased between that and the seller cash advance work that we talked about in payments this quarter, really good innovation that we're seeing from that team.

Operator, can we do one last question, please?

Certainly. Your final question comes from a line of Michael Morton from Moffitt & Aethensen. Your line is open.

Thank you for the question. I think probably for Jamie, following up on Tom's question a bit, just on the strength that you've seen in parts and accessories, could you break the key drivers to that for us? Is it the acquisition of my fitment following through the user experience now, I guess, like two years later, and improving conversion rate around that? And then the second part is what you talked about, trying to source inventory seems to skew towards parts and accessories, and it looks like it's most... Is that like... First question, is that a big contributor just having more inventory and that helps conversion? Then the second one is, when you look at it, it appears that a lot of it has been straightforward from what we see, like all of it is straightforward.

Do you

feel comfortable that that inventory is insulated from any political changes? I expect that to even happen next week. Thank you.

Yeah. So look, I think it's hard to say that there's one thing, because we've been working on parts and accessories for a couple of years, and we continue to innovate quarter after quarter. What I would tell you is all the work that we've done to increase customer satisfaction there started with the early work that we did in fitment, just in product binders in my garage and enhancing that whole experience. We now have over a hundred million cars in my garage, followed by really raising the trust level of what we did with guaranteed fit. I was on with a reporter earlier today, and he talked about buying a new front end for his Toyota Sienna, and it fit perfectly, and it's going to give him 10 more years. That's an example of just making those two products easier for customers to purchase. The point you called out, the breadth of inventory, plays a huge role in that. We have over 600 million unique listings in the marketplace and really unique inventory across a number of different segments of buyer enthusiasts. All of the acquisitions that MyFitman has certainly added to the fitment experience, the work that we've been doing to enhance not just the purchase, but the eventual service. We launched tire installation a couple of quarters ago, we launched that first in Germany, and that's been performing well. We just launched parts of the car, and now you can both buy the part on eBay and have it installed. P&A has really been the largest contributor to growth this year, despite lapping really strong growth that we have in 23. To your question on the political environment, the majority of our inventory is forward deployed from that perspective, and that's been something that we've been working with our sellers to do to really reduce shipping times and make the overall experience better. Excited by the innovation that we're seeing in P&A, the strength of it, and just the continued innovation of making the experience better and better.

This concludes eBay's third quarter 2024 earnings conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.