Market cap

* For banks, enterprise value is substituted with market cap. Source: Bloomberg Finance L.P.

Performance of the brand

eBay Inc. provides a wide range of online marketplaces and e-commerce platforms for the exchange of goods and services. The company’s businesses are split into two segments, marketplaces and payments. The former is involved with the provision of platforms for various forms of e-commerce. These platforms include eBay.com, eBay’s classifieds business, tickets marketplace and online shopping comparison site among others. The company’s payments segment includes the PayPal and Bill Me Later online payment solutions platforms. eBay’s PayPal brand has become increasingly important in recent years and company officials have acknowledged that it will not be long before PayPal’s revenues eclipse those of eBay leaving some commentators suggesting that the parent company ought to be rebranded as PayPal.

Brand Performance

Decline

In recent years eBay’s brand had come under increasing scrutiny due to a shift in the interests of consumers away from online auctions towards the more convenient and often cheaper marketplace deals like those found on Amazon.com. The company was criticised for the 2005 purchase of Skype, which it then failed to effectively integrate into its brand, as well as some of its business choices such as higher fees, alienating smaller sellers and favouring big merchants, contributing to the decline of its auctions business. These factors led to the emaciation of the eBay brand and contributed to its tumbling down the BrandFinance Global 500 league tables. 

Revival

However, the brand has undergone a revival over the last three years with consecutive yearly increases in its value. A number of events have contributed to this turnaround in the fortunes of the eBay brand. The acquisition of Skype by Microsoft meant that eBay eventually ended up several hundred million dollars up despite its failure to make anything of the brand. The deal buried much of the negativity that surrounded the failure of eBay to integrate the Skype brand into its own. 

Furthermore, the company has improved its approach to becoming a more retail orientated brand by acquiring GSI Commerce, a company which specialises in handling online shopping services for traditionally brick and mortar brands. This will move eBay closer to its overall objective of using its marketplace platforms as a tool to link buyers and large marketable brands. In order to reinforce its link with these brands and offer an alternative to Amazon for retail goods, eBay has recently unveiled a number of new advertising campaigns. 

In conjunction with this eBay is expanding the capabilities of its payment brand PayPal in order to more effectively market its products for sellers. A major part of this has been the developed of mobile payment options which will attempt to capture the potentially huge number of transactions from smartphone users. It is creating a new segment called X-commerce which will act as a tool for sellers to seamlessly link their entire e-commerce supply chain by combining these new PayPal products with newly developed applications and customer service products. These services will largely be free, because the company will still make money as the X-commerce tools will involve listings on eBay and payments on PayPal.                    

The company itself expects auction volumes to decline by 2% per year for the next five years as sellers continue to utilize the more customer-centric offerings of Amazon's marketplace. However, eBay's recent activities show it is attempting to improve its brand's appeal by not simply offering more goods, but by providing the most advanced tools to its users to make it the most cutting edge online marketplace in the world. 

League tables

eBay appears in the following brand league tables:

Rank 11 in the Best Retail Brands 2012.
Rank 98 in the Global 500 2012.
Rank 14 in the Best Retail Brands 2011.
Rank 115 in the Global 500 2011.
Rank 115 in the Global 500 2011.
Rank 166 in the Global 500 2010.
Rank 171 in the Global 500 2009.
Rank 128 in the Global 500 2008.
Rank 107 in the Global 250 2007.