Yesterday (October 19, 2011), eBay released their third quarter 2011 results. While these results are covered in detail by various Wall St. firms, we wanted to pull out some highlights that are relevant for eBay sellers. Note that all of my numbers are ex-autos and ex-fx to get a clear picture of what's going on. I also pull a lot of information from the conference call that you can get on replay from ebay's investor site or read the SeekingAlpha transcript here.
Key Metrics from the Q3 2011 Results (Marketplace unless otherwise denoted)
- Overall GMV was up 11%
- US GMV was up 14% (vs. e-commerce at 13%)
- International GMV was up 10%
- Active users grew 6% to 98.7m
- Fashion was up 18%
- Parts was up 23% (Complete category data is in the category details below)
- Items with free shipping grew to 40%
- Every day over 500,000 items are sold with free shipping in the US
- eBay now has 3 purchases/sec on mobile
- Sold items were up 10% - a 2 point acceleration from Q2
- eTRS sellers now represent 45% of GMV and are growing 23% y/y
- PayPal - up to 63 of top retailers (Added Target, JCrew, Zara)
- PayPal on eBay grew to over 73% - up 2% - Note this should really accelerate as the Cart is PayPal only - I don't think Wall St. analysts understand this, so probably a lot of PayPal upside starting in Q4 as this number essentially goes to 100% (or whatever it would be ex-autos)
All in all, it was a solid quarter and eBay seems to be growing right along with e-commerce which is good as they were losing share there for a while when they were lagging e-commerce. eBay's margins dipped in the Quarter and their fourth-quarter forecast was below expectations which has the stock down ~4% today as Wall St. resets expectations. Also, a lot of people are worried about the PayPal growth rate which was it's lowest ever (around 32%).
The Q+A session is always the most interesting and here's a couple of nuggets from that.
eBay not going to compete with FBA
An analysts, Matt@Wells Fargo, asked (paraphrasing here) ....what about the test on fulfillment...
-I suspect he was asking about this fulfillment program that was announced in June to help Chinese sellers with CBT into the US.