The memo reached eBay employees on Tuesday. It came from Jamie Iannone, the chief executive, and it carried a line that has become standard in technology but reads oddly next to a second round of cuts in the same year: “Our strategy is working.”
By Wednesday the company had confirmed the substance. EBay will eliminate about 1,000 jobs, roughly 9% of its workforce, and will keep hiring in what it calls priority areas aligned with its strategy. A spokesperson said the company was focusing operations on its top strategic priorities. Affected employees are to be told in the coming days.
The marketplace had 12,300 employees at the end of 2025, according to its annual filing. In February it cut about 800 roles, 6% of staff, spread across the company and attributed to duplication and a shift in operating model. Two rounds in eight months remove roughly 1,800 positions, or close to 15% of the head count it started the year with.
The shares rose about 1% in early trading, which tells you what investors had already assumed. EBay has been cutting for three years: 500 roles in February 2023, about 1,000 in January 2024, 800 in February 2026, and now this. Each announcement used similar language about focus and reinvestment, and each was followed by more hiring in the categories the company wanted to grow.
Those categories are specific. EBay has organized itself around collectibles, car parts and accessories, refurbished goods and fashion, and reported that gross merchandise volume in those focus categories grew more than 16% year over year in the fourth quarter. The rest of the marketplace, the general merchandise that once defined the site, has been shrinking or flat for years.
The company also bought its way into a younger customer. Its deal for Depop, the resale app Etsy sold, brings a user base that skews heavily under 34, an audience eBay has had trouble holding. Depop is a fashion business with a social feed, which is closer to Vinted and TikTok Shop than to a traditional auction site.
That purchase is the reason the cuts are being read as a reallocation rather than a retreat. EBay is spending on acquisitions and on artificial intelligence while reducing head count, a combination that only works if the money is moving from older operations into newer ones. The company has built AI tooling for sellers, used it to write listings and recommend prices, and partnered with OpenAI on agentic shopping, a bet that some purchases will eventually be initiated inside a chatbot rather than a search box.
EBay was founded in 1995 as a collectibles site called AuctionWeb and has spent most of the years since trying to stay relevant to shoppers who now start at Amazon. The focus categories are its answer: places where inventory is unique, condition matters, and a general-purpose retailer cannot simply undercut the listing.
The competition explains the urgency. EBay operates at a scale far below Amazon, which controls roughly 40% of U.S. online retail, and below Walmart, whose global e-commerce sales grew 23% in the quarter ended July 31. It also faces Temu, Shein and TikTok Shop on price and novelty, and Etsy on the handmade and vintage ground it helped invent.
There is a shareholder argument running underneath. In May, GameStop chief executive Ryan Cohen made an unsolicited $56 billion bid for eBay, a company many times his own size. EBay’s board rejected it, calling the offer “neither credible nor attractive.” The bid was widely treated as unserious, but it put a number on the table and reminded management that the market has views about how the company should be run.
EBay reports earnings next week. The layoffs, announced days before the call, will let management book a charge and describe the savings as investment capacity. Companies tend to prefer that sequence.
The company has also been building advertising, which sells promoted listings to its sellers and carries better margins than the take rate on a transaction. That business depends on buyer traffic, which puts a limit on how far cost cuts can go before they begin to remove the thing being sold.
For sellers, the practical effect depends on where the cuts land, and eBay has not said which teams are affected. Sellers deal with support queues, dispute resolution, policy enforcement and the reliability of the listing tools. Those functions have been reduced and automated in stages for years, and each round makes the automated path the only path.
For the third-party merchants who supply most of eBay’s inventory, the deeper question is traffic. A marketplace that trims costs while its general merchandise volume stagnates is a marketplace where the cost of selling rises relative to the number of buyers, whatever the take rate says.
Analysts said the pattern is now familiar across e-commerce: a mature marketplace with a defensible niche, a management team narrowing to that niche, and a workforce adjusted to the smaller operating footprint. The model can be profitable. It is not a growth story, and Iannone’s memo did not claim it was, only that the strategy behind it is working.
EBay has spent thirty years persuading people to buy used things from strangers. The question its next earnings call will have to answer is whether a company that keeps getting smaller in head count can still get bigger in the categories it has decided to keep.
