These are not the best of times for online retailer, eBay as it has announced plans to reduce its workforce by about 9% of its entire workforce or 1,000 full-time employees.
This was disclosed in an official announcement made on Wednesday.
According to CEO, Jamie Iannone, this is part of its plan to be “more nimble” in the face of a “challenging” economic environment. This will include plans to scale back on contract staff and replace them with alternate workforce in the coming months.
“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 worldwide,” the CEO explained.
The official statement by eBay requested that employees in the US should work from home on January 24 “to provide space and privacy for these conversations.” It also includes that employees would be notified if they were laid off by their leader over Zoom.
The early internet pioneer founded in 1995 has survived decades of changes and fierce competition in e-commerce. Today, it is a $21 billion company with nearly 12,000 employees.
This is the second round of job reductions at eBay in one year. The company announced in February 2023 that it would reduce its workforce by 500 employees or about 4%. At that time, the company noted a slowdown in consumer spending following the pandemic-fueled e-commerce boom.
According to Layoffs. fyi which tracks job cuts across the tech industry, eBay joins more than 60 other tech companies that have let almost 11,000 employees go in 2024.
These include another e-commerce giant Amazon.com Inc. and Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc. This month, Google CEO Sundar Pichai warned employees to expect additional layoffs in the months to come as the tech giant reorients itself toward artificial intelligence “and beyond.”
Language learning platform, Duolingo laid off around 10% of its contract workers as it moves to rely more heavily on artificial intelligence. Amazon also cut hundreds of jobs, including at streaming platform Twitch.
For months, eBay has been losing market share to bigger rivals such as Amazon.com Inc. and Walmart Inc. and has been gradually selling bits of the company.
The firm has been largely insulated from the downturn in advertising spending since it makes most of its money off sales commissions.
The company had 132 million active buyers as of September 30, down 3% from a year earlier.
