eBay are in the process of laying off approximately 1,000 roles or an estimated 9% of full-time employees. Additionally, they plan to scale back the number of contracts within their alternate workforce over the coming months.
This is desperately sad news for those impact and our thoughts are with them. eBay, for many, isn’t just a job for employees, for many it’s the pinnacle of their career to date, working for a company they genuinely love and a community that they adore.
In a note sent to all employees, eBay CEO Jamie Iannone explained that costs have outstripped growth:
Despite facing external pressures, like the challenging macroeconomic environment, we know we can be better with the factors we control. While we are making progress against our strategy, our overall headcount and expenses have outpaced the growth of our business. To address this, we’re implementing organizational changes that align and consolidate certain teams to improve the end-to-end experience, and better meet the needs of our customers around the world.
– Jamie Iannone, CEO, eBay
Yesterday, eBay requested that all US employees work from home, while those whose roles were being eliminated were contacted via a Zoom call. Once the bad news had been delivered, those who kept their jobs were to get an email letting them know the redundancies had been made in their teams.
I’m still trying to get my head around this ‘modern’ way of handling redundancies, I guess it’s a balance between the inevitable tears being able to be shed in private against the inability to say goodbye to your friends and team mates that you’ve built working relationships with, in some cases for many years.
The question many will be asking is will the changes bring more buyers to the platform in the long term and will the cost of acquiring sales decrease from what, with Promoted Listings taking the top search slots, is a record high. On that CEO Jamie said:
We are on a path to building a stronger eBay for the future — one that is growing, and resilient in the face of any challenge. Over the past three years, we made fundamental changes in our experiences across categories and accelerated the pace of innovation at eBay. In areas where we’re investing, we are seeing consistent increases in customer satisfaction and a meaningful improvement in our growth relative to the market.
– Jamie Iannone, CEO, eBay
3 Responses
This Doesn’t inspire us to invest effort or time into ebay
The big issue is eBay is to expensive and hardly anyone uses it.
They cannot build that business while the shareholders are at their throat for bigger returns, it just bumps along.
Am sure promoted listing will grow more arms and legs however.
Amazon had also laid thousands off.
They are crapping themselves, just had a phonecall from them asking why I ended all my ebay listings and if it’s because of the new HMRC reporting rules. Good riddance ebay, people will be taking their items to car boots instead.