eBay Live Gains Momentum with AI Merchandising and Depop Reallocations in Q2 2026

eBay Live: buyer/seller penetration, AI merchandising improvements, and potential marketing reallocation to Depop

1) Current penetration by buyers and sellers on eBay Live

The provided earnings transcript excerpts do not disclose explicit “penetration” rates for eBay Live (i.e., the % of active buyers and % of active sellers participating in Live). Instead, they provide growth rates and behavioral impact metrics.

What the excerpts do say (usable proxy)

• eBay Live growth: eBay Live “grew…approximately 7 to 8x year-on-year over the last few quarters.” ¹
• Buyer spending lift when starting in Live: buyers who start shopping in Live “are spending 70% more than comparable buyers that are not shopping on Live.” ²
• Seller performance lift for Live streamers: “sellers who stream regularly see more visits than comparable sellers.” ³
• GMV growth for established Live sellers: “over 90% grow their GMV on eBay,” and “the median GMV increase…is roughly 3x” for live sellers vs similar sellers who do not use Live. ⁴

The missing items (why exact penetration can’t be computed from these excerpts)

To compute “current penetration by buyers and sellers,” we would need, at minimum:

• number of active Live buyers vs total active buyers, and
• number of active Live sellers vs total active sellers.

The excerpt provides overall active buyer and enthusiast counts (e.g., active buyers 136 million on a trailing-12-month basis) ⁵ but does not provide the Live participant counts needed to calculate penetration. ³²⁴⁵

Conclusion on penetration: Based strictly on the excerpts, eBay Live penetration is not quantified as a % for buyers or sellers; the closest available evidence is that Live is scaling rapidly (7–8x YoY) ¹ and that Live participants generate materially higher engagement and spend/GMV lifts ²⁴, which strongly suggests meaningful but unreported participation levels. ³²⁴

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2) How AI is being used to improve merchandising (buying + selling)

The company describes multiple AI initiatives directly tied to merchandising productivity and discovery relevance.

For sellers: AI-assisted listing creation and optimization

• Magical Listing (next generation): leveraging “AI and our product knowledge graph to do most of the hard work on their behalf,” making selling “dramatically easier.” ⁶
• Rollout scope: the latest Magical Listing generation is “fully ramped…to all new and reactivated listers in the U.K., Germany, and Australia,” with “compelling uplift on key KPIs…directionally similar to what we observed in the U.S.” ⁶
• Pricing guidance: “In Q2, we began integrating enhanced pricing guidance into Magical Listing to help sellers balance velocity and price realization.” ⁶
• Shipping cost management: Magical Listing also “improved the accuracy of package size estimates to help manage shipping costs more efficiently.” ⁶

For buyers: AI-driven search, personalization, and conversational discovery

• Agentic search pilot: an “agentic search pilot reinforced the value of natural language understanding” in helping customers find products among “eBay’s 2.6 billion listings.” ⁶
• Next frontier for search/discovery: eBay is working “to bring more natural language capabilities into core search” and to develop “more conversational multiturn experiences” in parts of the shopping journey where it adds value. ⁶
• AI impact across the marketplace (explicitly merchandising/discovery-related): AI is described as helping “drive our search experience and our search conversion,” and being used in “CRM materials to be much more targeted.” ⁷
• Measurable platform-level positioning: the call states “AI enhancements to search and discovery” are helping buyers “find the most relevant items across our 2.6 billion listings.” ⁸

Net effect on merchandising (as described by management): AI is improving the supply side (faster, higher-quality listing creation and pricing/shipping estimation) ⁶ and the demand side (more relevant search results via natural language and conversational interactions). ⁶⁸

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3) Which core markets could reallocate marketing spend to Depop, and the size of those reallocations

What the excerpts explicitly say about reallocations

The excerpts provide directional policy, not quantified reallocation amounts:

• Management states: “some of our planned investments in Depop are being funded by deploying existing eBay C2C and fashion marketing dollars.” ⁹
• They also state that these Depop-funded marketing investments “don’t translate incrementally to expenses overall for eBay.” ⁹

Therefore, the excerpts do not provide a numeric “size of those reallocations” (e.g., $ amount or % of marketing spend by geography). ⁹

Which markets could be candidates (what’s implied in the excerpts)

The excerpts clearly describe:

• Depop’s strategic focus on the U.S.: Depop “decided to focus their efforts on the U.S. market,” and that it has been “performing very well.” ¹⁰
• eBay’s U.S. C2C fashion opportunity framing: management calls the U.S. pre-loved closet “even underpenetrated,” implying room to grow and therefore potentially justify demand-scaling/marketing shifts. ¹⁰
• Depop synergy rationale (including marketing expertise and brand/community discovery-led experience): eBay expects Depop to benefit from “marketing expertise” and other assets, and that investments have “synergies” between eBay and Depop. ¹¹

However, the question asks for “which core markets” (plural) and the “size of those reallocations.” The excerpts do not enumerate specific “core markets” with discretionary marketing budgets that could be moved to Depop, nor do they quantify the reallocated dollars. ⁹¹²

What we can responsibly quantify: Depop-related marketing spend funding mechanism (not amount)

• The only quantified statement related to reallocations is the mechanism: Depop investments are partly funded by deploying existing eBay C2C/fashion marketing dollars, and they are structured so they do not increase eBay’s overall expense base. ⁹

Conclusion on Depop marketing reallocation sizing

• Markets: the excerpts do not list specific eBay “core markets” (e.g., U.K., Germany, etc.) with a planned discretionary marketing transfer plan; the only clearly emphasized geography for Depop is the U.S. ¹⁰
• Size: no numerical dollar figure or percentage of marketing spend reallocated is given in the provided excerpt. ⁹

So the “size of reallocations” is not ascertainable from the supplied filings excerpts. ⁹

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Bottom line answers (directly to your question)

1. Current penetration by buyers and sellers on eBay Live: Not provided as a % of total active buyers/sellers in the excerpts. The excerpts show rapid scaling (7–8x YoY over multiple quarters) ¹ and large engagement/value lifts for participants (buyers spending 70% more; >90% of regular streamers growing GMV; median GMV increase ~3x). ²⁴
2. How AI is improving merchandising: AI is used to (a) make listing creation dramatically easier via Magical Listing using AI + product knowledge graph, including enhanced pricing guidance and improved package size estimation to manage shipping economics ⁶, and (b) improve buying discovery via natural language / agentic search, expanding natural language into core search and building conversational multiturn shopping experiences, supported by the fact that buyers find more relevant items across 2.6B listings. ⁶⁸
3. Core markets to reallocate marketing spend to Depop & size of reallocations: The excerpt indicates Depop investments are partly funded by deploying existing eBay C2C and fashion marketing dollars and that this does not translate to incrementally higher eBay expenses overall, but it does not provide geographic market-by-market transfer targets nor a quantified $/% reallocation amount. ⁹ The U.S. is the primary Depop focus described as “performing very well.” ¹⁰