To address staffing growth that has exceeded business gains and a tough macroeconomic environment, eBay will reconfigure the company’s workforce with plans to lay off about 1,000 employees, or approximately 9% of its staff.
The move comes after other retailers that operate primarily online, including Amazon and Wayfair, reduced workforces that they had expanded rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Organizational changes will align and consolidate a number of employee teams in an effort to better meet the needs of eBay customers around the world, Jamie Iannone, the company’s president and CEO, stated in a blog post.
He noted that, as it deals with a challenging external environment, eBay will work with factors the company can control, such as staffing.
In the blog, Iannone asserted, in part:
We are on a path to building a stronger eBay for the future, one that is growing, and resilient in the face of any challenge. Over the past three years, we made fundamental changes in our experiences across categories and accelerated the pace of innovation at eBay. In areas where we’re investing, we are seeing consistent increases in customer satisfaction and a meaningful improvement in our growth relative to the market.
Our strategy is the right one, but there is more we can do to ensure our success. We need to better organize our teams for speed, allowing us to be more nimble, bring like-work together, and help us make decisions more quickly.
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 around the world.
