Doing some work to counteract the image that eBay is struggling with since its amicable divorce with PayPal, eBay has posted its second straight quarter of sales gains. The market surely took the results as a sign of a corner being turned, as stocks were up 6 percent.
“We made good progress on our strategy, and we are starting to see some positive movement in underlying traffic and conversion metrics driven by early versions of our new user experiences,” said Chief Executive Devin Wenig on a call with analysts.
For the immediate future, Wenig pointed to eBay’s plans to ramp up marketing efforts and push the boundaries of AI to get better insight into consumer shopping intentions.
EBay faces an increasingly competitive environment as eCommerce sector leader Amazon continues to grow at a near exponential pace with a more dedicated focus on smaller third-party sellers on their site. It also faces emerging competition from up-and-comers like Jet.com. EBay has also had to overcome difficulties with how its items are appearing in Google searches.
Despite difficulties, eBay had some strong news to report out of StubHub, which posted a 40 percent increase in sales. Buttressed by the solid result, eBay has also announced its intention to buy back $2.5 billion of its own stock.
