eBay
still trading

Right now, somewhere on eBay, a teenager is selling a graded Charizard card for more than a used car. A retiree in Ohio is shipping a rebuilt carburetor to a man in Lisbon. A sneaker resale shop is moving its forty-third pair of the week, each one inspected by a stranger in a warehouse before it ships. None of these people have met. None of them will. And all of them, for a few minutes, trust each other completely.

That is the whole trick. eBay is not a store. It owns almost none of the things it sells. It is a place where 136 million buyers and millions of sellers across roughly 190 markets agree to behave - and where, on the strength of that agreement, about $22 billion in goods changed hands in the first quarter of 2026 alone.

For a while, the world assumed eBay was a museum piece - the dial-up relic that Amazon had quietly buried. The world was early. In Q1 2026 the company posted its first $3 billion revenue quarter since 2021, with gross merchandise volume up 18%. The old auction house, it turns out, had simply gone off to figure out what it was actually good at.

In 1995, the idea of mailing a check to someone you found on a website, and trusting them to mail something back, sounded less like commerce and more like a confidence trick. The internet had no manners. There was no way to know if the seller was a saint or a scammer, and no recourse if you guessed wrong.

That was the wall every online marketplace hit: not technology, but trust. You could build the listings, the search, the checkout. You could not, with code alone, make two anonymous people believe in each other. eBay's entire history is a 30-year argument that you actually can - if you give people a reason to behave and a record of whether they did.

Over the 1995 Labor Day weekend, a 28-year-old programmer named Pierre Omidyar wrote some code on his personal computer and bolted an auction page onto his website. He called it AuctionWeb. It was, by his own framing, an experiment in whether an open and honest market could organize itself.

The first thing that sold was a broken laser pointer, for $14.83. Omidyar emailed the buyer to make sure he understood it was broken. The buyer replied that he collected broken laser pointers. Right there, in a single transaction, was the entire thesis: the world is full of people who want oddly specific things, and the only thing standing between them and a seller is trust.

The charming story that eBay was founded so Omidyar's fiancee could trade Pez dispensers? A public relations invention from 1997, later admitted to be a myth. The real origin was duller and more radical - a belief that a marketplace built on reputation could police itself. Omidyar's answer to the trust problem became the feedback score: a public, permanent record of whether you kept your word. It is the ancestor of every star rating and reviewer badge you have ever squinted at online.

For years eBay's answer to "what do you sell?" was a shrug: everything. That is a fine slogan and a terrible strategy. When you sell everything, you are the best place for nothing - which is roughly the position eBay found itself in as Amazon perfected the boring, reliable purchase.

So eBay narrowed. It leaned into what it calls Focus Categories - trading cards, sneakers, watches, luxury fashion, auto parts, refurbished electronics - the stuff where selection, rarity, and price actually matter and where a one-size-fits-all megastore is useless. Then it solved the trust problem all over again, this time physically: under Authenticity Guarantee, a real expert holds your watch or your sneakers, checks them, and only then sends them on.

On top of that sits a quietly modern toolkit. Generative AI now writes your listing from a photo - titles, descriptions, item specifics - so selling your old camera takes a minute instead of an evening. eBay International Shipping makes a seller in Idaho global without the paperwork. And the company's fastest-growing, highest-margin business is advertising: sellers paying to surface their listings, the same model that made everyone else rich.

Strategy decks are cheap. Gross merchandise volume is not. After years of flat-to-falling results that had analysts writing obituaries, eBay's reinvention started showing up in the only place that counts - the ledger.

eBay's stated purpose is to connect buyers and sellers and create economic opportunity for all. That can read like the boilerplate every company keeps in a drawer. But eBay has an unfair advantage here: its business model is, almost by accident, an environmental argument.

Every pre-owned jacket, refurbished phone, and salvaged car part that finds a second owner is one that didn't get manufactured fresh or buried in a landfill. Recommerce - the resale of used goods - isn't a marketing pivot for eBay. It is what the company has done since a man bought a broken laser pointer on purpose in 1995. The rest of retail is only now discovering circularity. eBay has three decades of receipts.

The trust problem never actually gets solved. It just changes shape. In 1995 the question was whether the stranger would mail the box. In 2026 it's whether the watch is real, whether the AI wrote an honest listing, whether the resale economy can scale without drowning in fakes. Every era hands eBay a new version of the same puzzle, and the company's answer is always some mix of expertise and accountability rather than blind faith in code.

That's the bet for tomorrow. As more commerce slides toward the pre-owned, the rare, and the AI-mediated, the platform that wins won't be the cheapest or the biggest. It'll be the one buyers believe. eBay has been practicing belief longer than almost anyone online.