April 20th, 2007 by Skip McGrath

eBay announced their first quarter profits, etc. this week and there are some interesting trends to note…

If you’re as busy as I am you’re probably a little shocked that the first quarter is already over. This time there are some interesting things to note about eBay stores and PayPal particularly when you consider the changes made to these features in the past 9 months.

First, let’s get the general information out of the way:

1. Marketplace net revenue is up 23% from the first quarter last year to $1.25 billion. Total net revenue is up 27% to $1.77 billion.
2. There are 233 million registered eBay users and 82.9 million of them are active (i.e. bought, bid on, listed or sold something in the last 12 months).
3. During the first quarter there were 588 million listings (up 2%).
4. The Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV) is up 14% to $14.25 billion.
5. PayPal payments are up 31% to $439 million.
6. The number of PayPal accounts is now 143 million (up 36%).
7. The total payment volume (TPV) is up 30% to $8.77 billion.

I think we can see the TPV for PayPal increasing over the next quarter as eBay’s discontinuation of fraud protection on all other payment methods really makes an impact.

Here’s an interesting note: the number of active eBay users is going up at a much lower rate than we’ve seen in the past.

As you can see in the table, the number of users is still increasing, but the year over year increase has gone down by 15%. From the Quarter over Quarter comparison, you can see that it’s very close to being break-even (i.e. no increase) and possibly even losing active users.

Another interesting fact can be seen in the eBay Stores numbers.

This first table shows the number of eBay Store listings:

You can see how the increase sharply dropped to a decrease after eBay announced the increased fees in the 3rd Quarter. This isn’t really suprizing, but the next table is.

Even after the fee increase, the number of stores has increased. This means that for every store a seller closed, at least one seller opened a new one. But, the number of listings within those stores is significantly lower than before the fee increase (25% lower than in the second quarter of 2006, right before the increase).

So it looks like eBay is doing well in most areas and is doing what they intended in eBay Stores. They’ve managed to keep the stores open, but with less inventory. Unfortunately, eBay doesn’t release the exact amount of sales that come from store listings, so it is impossible to speculate about the per-listing value (which is what eBay was wanting to increase).

See Also

• The Complete eBay Marketing System
  Everything you need to know to sell on eBay – written by a Gold level eBay Powerseller