“Years of investment” are paying off for eBay, as the online marketplace’s revenue and gross merchandise value (GMV) have grown in its fiscal Q4 and 2025 — especially when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI).
CEO Jamie Iannone called 2025 a “watershed year” for innovation at eBay. Iannone said eBay’s proprietary technology infrastructure helped transition the online marketplace from generative AI pilots to “scalable agentic experiences.”
The online marketplace’s agentic AI “actively” does more of “the hard work” for eBay buyers and sellers, he added. In Q4, that manifested with eBay rolling out the next generation of what it calls its “magical listing” AI tool.
“Unlike prior iterations where we integrated generative AI technology into legacy workflows, this new experience leverages AI agents from the start to autonomously build listings from images alone,” Iannone said.
He said that foundation will enable eBay to “deliver hyper-personalized agentic experiences that anticipate our customers’ needs and drive tangible value for our business.”
Roughly 90% of eBay GMV is “non-new and seasoned, and two-thirds of that intersects with focus categories, recommerce or with C2C,” Iannone said. He noted that the items on eBay’s marketplace are often used, unique, refurbished, collectible or luxury items. He said their condition, scarcity and human judgment matter.
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).
How eBay is fleshing out its own agentic AI tools
The magical listing generative AI tool now includes an agent that guides users on which photos to take for their products, Iannone said. The objective, according to Iannone, is to make those products more appealing to consumers and “increase the likelihood of a sale.”
“In the background, AI agents create the title, category and item specifics by leveraging advanced models and our product knowledge graph,” Iannone said. “AI also provides intelligent pricing recommendations based on real-time transaction data helping sellers balance velocity and price realization to optimize their cash flow.”
And eBay has implemented the tool as the default listing experience for all new and reactivated sellers on iOS and Android in the U.S.
Since then, he said, eBay has seen a more than 25% decrease in average listing time. Simultaneously, it has seen a more than 50% increase in the rate that users create new listings, as well as double-digit percentage increases in sold items and GMV per lister.
In December, eBay began to change its product-discovery process by implementing agentic AI-powered search. It began rolling out the process for an unspecified subset of U.S. mobile traffic.
Iannone said the agentic search technology allows consumers to use “natural language in a back-and-forth dialogue, just like they would with a knowledgeable sales associate that understands their style, preferences and shopping history.”
He said eBay “built the functionality into the core search experience rather than off to the side.” Moreover, he said eBay uses a query agent to classify intent, which then allows the marketplace to balance “trade-offs between latency, compute costs and query optimization quality.”
Connecting eBay to other agentic commerce experiences
“We’ve always been open to making our unique inventory available on scaled third-party channels,” Iannone said.
He cited examples of doing so via Google Shopping and Facebook Marketplaces. As such, eBay is taking the same approach with agentic commerce, according to Iannone.
His first priority has been to build in-house agentic capabilities, he said. When it comes to partnering with other platforms, he said, eBay has built a “unified agentic commerce” experience that enables it to “plug into third-party agents.” And in doing so, eBay can also test different experiences to see what works best for its marketplace, he said.
He noted that eBay has signed up to be an early participant in OpenAI’s advertising pilot program.
In response to an analyst’s question about agentic platforms guiding consumers to eBay, Iannone said the traffic from AI “is very small.”
“And it’s not just for us,” he said. “There’s not a lot of traffic being driven. The traffic that is being driven is high-intent, and so we are seeing kind of high conversion on that in terms of the traffic that’s there.”
eBay revenue in Q4 2025
Iannone noted that growth in eBay’s focus categories, consumer-to-consumer (C2C) and recommerce businesses, guided revenue increases. The marketplace identifies recommerce as the sale of pre-owned and refurbished goods. Each of those areas grew in the high single digits or low double digits in eBay’s fiscal 2025. They also drove a “significant majority” of eBay GMV in 2025 — about two-thirds of its business.
Five focus categories accounted for $10 billion or more in global eBay GMV in 2025. Among them were fashion, collectibles, and automotive parts and accessories.
Overall, eBay GMV grew about 6% to nearly $80 billion globally in 2025. In the U.S., eBay grew GMV about 10%. Focus category growth exceeded 12%, while C2C made up about 25% of total eBay GMV. In addition, eBay has driven GMV growth through flexible payment options such as Klarna, he said.
On Black Friday, specifically, Iannone said eBay Live GMV set a single-day record that included about $2 million in sales. During Q4, eBay has also expanded eBay live to Australia and Germany. In its current quarter, it launched in Canada, Italy and France.
At the same time, eBay revenue increased about 7% to reach $11.1 billion in 2025. Iannone credited much of that growth to advertising, which reached about $2 billion in annual revenue.
Total eBay advertising revenue in Q4 reached $544 million. It represented GMV penetration of nearly 2.6%. Within the eBay platform specifically, first-party ads grew by more than 17% to reach $517 million. Off-platform advertising revenue was $21 million.
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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