eBay's strategic pivot to collectibles, fashion, and vehicles is producing real growth — and real consequences for the millions of sellers operating outside those categories. Here's what's happening, what it means, and what to do about it.
Something has quietly shifted inside eBay over the past two years — and depending on what you sell, it either looks like a platform finally finding its footing, or a slow withdrawal of support for the sellers who built it.
From the outside, eBay's numbers look healthy. In Q4 2025, gross merchandise volume grew 10% to $21.2 billion. Revenue hit $3 billion — up 15% year-over-year. Focus categories grew over 15%, with collectibles, luxury fashion, motors parts and accessories, and vehicles all performing strongly. CEO Jamie Iannone told investors the company ended 2025 with consecutive quarters of positive GMV growth and framed the platform's future around a single word: enthusiasts.
But for sellers in home goods, consumer electronics, general merchandise, or everyday commodities, those headline numbers can feel like they belong to a different platform than the one they're actually selling on. Search impressions down. Promoted listing costs creeping up. AI tools and platform investment flowing to categories they don't operate in. Forums full of sellers asking the same question: "Is it just me, or has something changed?"
It isn't just you. And understanding why requires stepping back from your own listings and looking at the full picture of what eBay is trying to become.
The Amazon Problem eBay Has Been Trying to Solve
For over a decade, eBay's core challenge has been an uncomfortable one: it occupies the same broad space as Amazon, but with a fraction of the logistics infrastructure, brand recognition, and buyer traffic. Competing head-to-head on commodity goods — your basic kitchen gadgets, phone cases, household staples — is a game eBay structurally cannot win. Amazon's fulfillment network, Prime loyalty, and search dominance make it the default choice for buyers who want something standard, fast, and predictable.
The strategic response to this problem, which Iannone has been executing since 2021, is to stop competing where Amazon is strongest and double down where it is weakest. Amazon struggles with trust in pre-owned goods. It has no meaningful presence in collectibles. It cannot replicate the depth and passion of a community built around trading cards, vintage watches, or car parts. These are markets where uniqueness, provenance, and expertise matter — and where eBay's 30-year history gives it a genuine edge.
So eBay stopped chasing volume and started chasing enthusiasm. In investor calls, Iannone now talks almost exclusively about "enthusiast buyers" — a cohort spending over $3,200 annually on the platform as of Q3 2025, and growing. Recommerce (pre-owned and refurbished goods) made up over 40% of GMV in 2025. The platform's AI tools, marketing dollars, listing features, and partnership investments are flowing overwhelmingly toward these focus categories.
On paper, this is a sensible strategic retreat to defensible ground. In practice, for sellers outside those categories, it is a platform that is gradually — and deliberately — optimising for someone else.
The Depop Deal: A Signal, Not Just an Acquisition
If the strategy wasn't clear enough from earnings calls, eBay's February 2026 announcement of its $1.2 billion acquisition of Depop from Etsy makes it unmistakable.
Depop is a mobile-first, social-forward fashion marketplace built around pre-loved clothing, with 7 million active buyers — nearly 90% of them under 34 — and approximately $1 billion in annual GMV. Its nearly 60% US growth in 2025 represents exactly the kind of trend-driven, community-powered commerce that eBay wants more of. The acquisition isn't just about fashion; it's about demographics. eBay's main platform has been stuck around 134–135 million active buyers for years, barely moving without M&A help. Depop brings a younger audience that eBay has been unable to attract organically.
Iannone's plan is to keep Depop as a standalone brand — similar to how Goldin Auctions operates within eBay's ecosystem — while using eBay's backend infrastructure (authentication, shipping, financial services, cross-listing) to accelerate its growth. The strategy is to build a constellation of enthusiast-focused marketplaces, each serving a passionate vertical, stitched together by eBay's platform capabilities.
This acquisition, combined with earlier moves into Goldin (high-end collectibles), Caramel (vehicle transactions), and TCGplayer (trading cards), reveals the full shape of what eBay is building: a portfolio of niche-passion platforms. Standard multi-category selling, commodity goods, and general merchandise are conspicuously absent from that vision.
What Sellers in Non-Focus Categories Are Actually Experiencing
While eBay's investor narrative is polished and consistent, seller forums tell a different story. Across Reddit, eBay's own community boards, and Facebook seller groups, threads about declining visibility and unexplained sales drops are a constant undercurrent.
"My sales are down over 50% for the last three months compared to last year... I know my listings are not being found in search results. I'm pretty much ghosted even though I can see them myself."
— eBay Community Forum, 2025
Some of this is algorithmic: eBay's AI-powered search has been updated to better match high-intent enthusiast buyers with relevant product signals, which can inadvertently deprioritise listings that don't fit the new model. Some is structural: Promoted Listings costs have climbed, with suggested ad rates pushing well above the old floor, meaning organic visibility has effectively shrunk for sellers who won't or can't pay to compete.
And some is simply a resource allocation reality. eBay's AI listing tools, its Magical Listings experience, its Inventory Mapping API — these features were rolled out first and most deeply in focus categories. Sellers in home goods or consumer electronics are often working with older tooling and less algorithmic support, even while paying the same final value fees as everyone else.
To be fair, not all sellers are suffering — and macroeconomic factors (tariffs, consumer confidence, the strong dollar suppressing international demand) are contributing to the pain. But the pattern is hard to ignore: sellers in eBay's priority categories are growing. Sellers outside them are, at best, holding steady.
Is This a Smart Strategy or a Slow Retreat?
It's worth giving eBay's strategy its due. The focus category approach is working in the metrics that matter to investors. Pokémon card GMV grew triple digits for the third consecutive quarter in Q3 2025. eBay Live — the platform's livestream selling format — has grown 7x year-over-year in GMV. Enthusiast buyers don't churn the way general shoppers do; they come back, they spend more, and they're stickier even in downturns. From a pure business sustainability standpoint, chasing passion-driven commerce over commodity volume is defensible.
But the strategy carries real risks that the earnings call narrative tends to gloss over. eBay has now been unable to grow its core active buyer base organically for at least 15 consecutive quarters without M&A — a structural weakness that no amount of focus category momentum can fully disguise. The platform's total GMV of $75 billion in 2024 grew just 1%, meaning focus category outperformance is being partially offset by weakness elsewhere. That weakness largely lives in the categories eBay has deprioritised.
There is also a cultural risk. eBay's identity as "America's garage sale" — the place where anyone could sell anything to anyone — built enormous goodwill among a broad seller community. That community is now being stratified, with a tier of enthusiast-category sellers receiving platform investment and a much larger group discovering, often gradually, that they are not the future eBay is building for.
So Where Does That Leave You?
If your eBay business sits primarily outside the focus categories — and most multichannel sellers do — the strategic imperative is the same one many of you have been operating on already: never build a single-platform business on someone else's infrastructure.
Here's what the realistic options look like right now:
Amazon — The obvious alternative for commodity sellers, and the one eBay has been retreating from. For sellers in home goods, electronics, or general merchandise, Amazon FBA remains the highest-volume channel available — with all the margin pressure, competition, and policy risk that entails. If you're already multichannel, ensuring your Amazon listings are fully optimised is the highest-leverage move right now.
TikTok Shop — The fastest-growing channel for discovery-driven categories. If your products are visual, demonstrable, or trend-adjacent, TikTok Shop deserves serious attention. It's not built for every category, but for fashion, home, beauty, and lifestyle goods, it's generating real volume for sellers who commit to content.
Walmart Marketplace — Often underutilised by international sellers, Walmart Marketplace continues to grow its third-party seller program and represents a meaningful channel for US-targeted commodity goods with less competition than Amazon.
Own-channel DTC — For established sellers with a defined customer base, building a Shopify store — even if it only handles 10–15% of your volume — gives you a platform you control and audience data that belongs to you. The insurance value alone is worth the setup cost.
And it's worth noting: even within eBay, there are sellers who are thriving outside the official focus categories. They tend to be niche-oriented, deeply knowledgeable in their product area, and willing to invest in listing quality and promoted listings strategically. The platform hasn't abandoned non-focus categories entirely — it just isn't going out of its way to develop them.
The Bigger Picture for Multichannel Sellers
eBay's strategic narrative is coherent and, in investor terms, it's working. The company is delivering growth by concentrating resources, acquiring adjacent platforms, and building a brand around passion-driven commerce. If you sell Pokémon cards, vintage watches, luxury handbags, or car parts, eBay has never been more invested in your success.
If you don't sell those things, the platform is still a valuable channel — but it is increasingly one that you should treat as a distribution point rather than a growth partner. eBay will take your listings, process your transactions, and collect its fees. The algorithmic love, the product innovation, the marketing dollars — those are going elsewhere.
The sellers who will navigate this well are the ones who saw this shift coming — or who see it now — and made platform diversification a strategic priority before they needed it. The Depop acquisition is the latest, clearest signal of where eBay is heading. The question is whether that direction includes your business.
For most multichannel sellers, the honest answer is: probably not at the centre of it. And that's information worth acting on.
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