Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by O1111OOO 877 days ago
> I don't doubt that running eBay is more complex than it appears, but it's just a web site to buy and sell goods. That's an army of people!

It's interesting that I had the opposite reaction. eBay is a _worldwide_, multi-billion dollar institution. They've been around for about 28 years (~1995) - since the start of it all...

I really thought the number of employees would be higher.

I turned to Wikipedia for some numbers (apple to oranges comparison, I know... but I was curious).

   Walmart   : 2,300,000 : Jan 2022
   Amazon    : 1,684,853 : Nov 2023
   Target    :   440,000 : ??? 2023
   Microsoft :   238,000 : ??? 2023
   Alphabet  :   181,798 : Jun 2023
   Best Buy  :    90,000 : Jan 2023
   B&N       :    24,000 : ??? 2019
   eBay      :    11,600 : Dec 2022
(People really have the audacity to compare eBay to Amazon)

I didn't realize that eBay was so small. Now they lost 1k. I haven't visited eBay in eons but a 9% reduction in their workforce from such an already low number is devastating (to me).

Are we looking at the end of eBay? They may have become staid... old in their thinking.

I constantly see Amazon, for example, open up new territories in other areas. They went from eBooks to general ecommerce to servers to hardware to voice AI to home gadgets. There seems to be nothing this company won't consider. They think like a startup.

eBay may be another Xerox (or Mozilla...) unless they can get their management team thinking outside their comfort zone.

1 comments

Replying to myself. I wanted to include other companies that are somewhat similar to eBay as far as what OP implied. I only looked at companies between 6k - 22k employees.

   Ubisoft   :    20,665 : video games
   Yandex    :    18,004 : search
   Equifax   :    14,000 : credit bureau
   Autodesk  :    13,700 : software
   EA        :    13,400 : video games (electronic arts)
   Netflix   :    12,800 : video streaming
   Shopify   :    11,600 : eCommerce
   eBay      :    11,600 : Dec 2022
   Unity     :     7,703 : video games
   GoDaddy   :     6,910 : domains, websites
It's hard to make sense of these numbers without lots more info but it's interesting - as a first pass - to match number of employees with expectations.