eBay Inc.

eBay Inc. is an American e-commerce company that operates one of the world's largest online marketplaces, connecting 135 million active buyers with sellers in more than 190 markets and enabling nearly $80 billion in gross merchandise volume in fiscal 2025. Unlike Amazon or Walmart, eBay carries no inventory and competes not on fulfillment speed but on selection — the 2.5 billion live listings on its platform include everything from used clothing to collectible trading cards to auto parts, much of it non-new-in-season inventory that cannot be found on a traditional retail shelf.

This is a rehabilitation story dressed as a steady-state cash compounder. eBay spent much of the post-PayPal-spinoff era (2015–2019) searching for an identity while its core marketplace lost relevance to Amazon's Prime-driven flywheel. The pandemic gave it a transient volume surge; the normalization that followed forced a strategy reset that is now, three years in, producing measurable results. Under CEO Jamie Iannone, the company has narrowed its focus to enthusiast categories — collectibles, motors parts and accessories, luxury fashion, refurbished goods, sneakers — where eBay's unique inventory breadth and trust infrastructure give it a genuine moat, and away from head-to-head commodity battles it cannot win.

The file turns on a single question: whether the enthusiast-focused strategy can sustain mid-single-digit-or-better GMV growth and expand the take rate through advertising, or whether the current momentum — 14% GMV growth in Q1 2026 — is a transitory convergence of trading-card mania, gold-price speculation, and favorable comparisons that will fade as comps normalize.