EBay Inc. grew revenue year over year in both its Q4 and full fiscal 2024, which ended Dec. 31, 2024.
Still, the online marketplace has yet to reach its pre-pandemic revenue peak of $10.8 billion in 2019. Similarly, eBay gross merchandise value (GMV) grew year over year in 2024 but remains short of its pre-pandemic status.
In its fiscal 2024, eBay revenue grew to $10.28 billion. That was a 2% increase over $10.11 billion in 2023.
During the year, eBay launched its first proprietary large language models (LLMs), president and CEO Jamie Iannone told investors on the marketplace’s Q4 earnings call. He said the majority of eBay sellers now use generative AI tools, including its “Magical Listing” offering, AI-enhanced product backgrounds and automated social media posting.
Also for the full-year fiscal 2024, eBay GMV grew 1% to $74.7 billion. Iannone credited the GMV growth in part to Automotive Parts & Accessories, which he said is the marketplace’s largest category.
He said a driver in eBay’s GMV turnaround has been “reestablishing eBay as a trusted place to shop for auto parts.” He added that eBay’s acquisition of Caramel has helped with that. Caramel is an online platform for vehicle transactions.
Starting in the online marketplace’s fiscal Q1, he said, U.S. sellers will be able to list cars, trucks and motorcycles on eBay using Caramel’s end-to-end checkout solution.
EBay ranks No. 6 in Digital Commerce 360’s Global Online Marketplaces Database. The database ranks the 100 largest such marketplaces by third-party gross merchandise value (GMV).
EBay revenue and GMV in Q4 2024
In Q4, eBay revenue remained nearly flat year over year, growing 1% to $2.58 billion.
That’s flat quarter over quarter. It also marks a slow but steady rise in eBay revenue by quarter since Q3 2022.
Also in Q4, eBay advertising revenue grew 12% to $445 million. About 3.4 million sellers used eBay ad products in Q4, according to Iannone.
Meanwhile, eBay ended 2024 with three consecutive quarters of GMV growth. In Q4, eBay GMV grew 4% to $19.3 billion.
“Trading cards volume accelerated to healthy double-digit growth, making this category the largest contributor to GMV growth in Q4,” Iannone said. ” We drove significant innovation for trading card enthusiasts in the past year, including rolling out Magical Bulk Listing, expanding our authentication and grading partnerships, scaling up eBay Live, and improving our catalog data across multiple sports and genres.”
By the end of 2024, eBay had upgraded its generative AI capabilities by increasing its GPU capacity, Iannone said. It deployed its first supercomputer, which developed “architectures optimized for LLMs. Our enhanced AI platform enabled us to build and run models approximately 100 times larger than the prior year.”
To build those proprietary LLMs from scratch, eBay used decades of its ecommerce data, he said. It also pre-trained open-source models on its dataset to improve their accuracy on specific eBay use cases, he added.
Tariffs affect eBay 2025 outlook
In January, eBay began collaborating with OpenAI Operator, Iannone said. Operator is an AI agent that OpenAI says can open its own browser to perform tasks for users.
“This agentic approach to ecommerce could create an entirely new channel for discovery and shopping online,” Iannone said. “Although it’s early days, we anticipate this collaboration could expand the reach of our sellers, giving more buyers exposure to eBay’s unique and differentiated inventory.
Chief financial officer Steve Priest told investors eBay is operating in a challenging macro environment. He said it’s “facing the uncertainty around U.S. tariffs and de minimis changes.”
He said eBay is “contemplating a range of outcomes for tariffs in our guidance based on what we can see and forecast.”
With tariffs factored in, eBay expects to generate low-single-digit growth to its gross merchandise volume (GMV) in 2025.
John Egbert, vice president of investor relations at eBay, said products it sourced from China to the U.S. made up about 5% of total GMV in its fiscal Q4.
About 75% of eBay volume from China is “forward deployed,” Egbert said. In other words, those products are sitting in U.S. warehouses and are already subject to tariffs. And eBay manages half of the remaining 25% through a program called SpeedPAK, he said. That “can help sellers handle the complexity of tariffs as cost is not the only challenge,” he added.
Percentage changes may not align due to rounding. Check back for more earnings reports. Here’s our last update on eBay sales, revenue and GMV.
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