eBay Statistics
- eBay.co.uk hit the 15 million customer milestone in May 2006*
- eBay.co.uk has achieved the ten million live listings landmark, meaning there are more than ten million items for sale on the site at any one time*
- Every third internet user visits eBay.co.uk at least once a month (Nielsen / Netratings, April 2006)
- eBay.co.uk has over 13,000 categories
- eBay is the top brand name on the net, according to calculations by net monitoring company Envisional (Envisional, April 2005)
- eBay.co.uk’s audience reached 11.14 million in June 2006 (Nielsen / Netratings, June 2006)
- eBay.co.uk’s reach was 41.59% in June 2006 (Nielsen / Netratings, June 2006, where reach is the percentage of all active internet users within that month visiting eBay.co.uk)
- Nielsen now reports that eBay.co.uk accounts for a staggering: 10% of all the time Brits spend on the internet. For comparison, if you add together the audience of all 7 of the BBC’s major sites, their unique audience last month was 12.8 million, each of whom on average spent a total of 45 minutes on across their sites. The unique audience on eBay.co.uk was 11.14 million, each of whom spent an average of 2hours and 18mins on eBay.co.uk
- People in the UK – as is true with Germany — spend more time on eBay than any other website (Nielsen / Netratings, April 2006).
- People in the UK spend more money on eBay than they spend on going to the movies (Screen International)
- In 2004, gross merchandise volume (GMV), the value of all successfully closed listings on eBay.co.uk reached a record $3.7 billion
- The UK continues to grow at very strong rates, and in the process reached an important milestone: the UK achieved its first ever $100M revenue quarter in Q2
eBay Inc Facts and figures
- eBay has a global presence in 33 markets.
- eBay has 203 million registered users worldwide.
- Profitable since its launch, eBay Inc. net revenues totalled $1.41 billion in Q2-06. eBay Inc.’s International business achieved net
- revenues of $686.1 million in Q2-06.
- In Q2-06, gross merchandise volume (GMV), the total value of all successfully closed items on eBay’s trading platforms, was $12.9billion.
- eBay users worldwide trade more than $1,640 worth of goods on the site every second.
- There were 596 million new listings added to eBay worldwide in Q2-06. At any given time, there are approximately 104 million listings worldwide, and approximately 6.5 million listings are added per day. eBay users trade in more than 50,000 categories.
- Based on Q2-06 GMV, the following categories delivered $1 billion or more in worldwide annualized GMV: Motors at $17.1 billion; Clothing & Accessories at $3.9 billion; Consumer Electronics at $3.7 billion; Computers at $3.5 billion; Home & Garden at $2.9 billion; Books/Music/Movies at $2.6 billion; Sports at $2.5 billion; Collectibles at $2.3 billion; Business & Industrial at $1.9 billion; Toys at $1.7 billion; Jewelry & Watches at $1.7 billion; Cameras & Photo at $1.4 billion; Antiques & Art at $1.1 billion and Coins & Stamps at $1.0 billion.
- While eBay is well-known for its auction format, users can also buy and sell in fixed-price formats, which accounted for 35% of total GMV during Q2-06.
- At the end of Q2-06, eBay hosted approximately 541,000 stores worldwide, with approximately 255,000 stores hosted on the U.S. site and 286,000 stores hosted on eBay’s international sites.
- Approximately 1.3 million sellers around the world use eBay as a primary or secondary source of income. (Source: ACNielsen International Research, June 2006)
- As of April 2006, eBay members worldwide have left more than 4.5 billion feedback comments for one another regarding their eBay transactions.
- The most expensive item sold on eBay to date is a private business jet for $4.9 million.




June 19th, 2008 at 8:02 pm
eBay has now made using PayPal mandatory for sellers in the UK. Far from offering protection, PayPal itself is a bigger scam than anything else unsuspecting sellors or vendors are likely to encounter. PayPal have illegally frozen members accounts, fined its customers arbitrarily with no right of reply and have ignored lawsuits against them.
PayPal are effectively an online bank, but are not governed by standard banking rules, and therefore are very difficult to bring to account for the kind of practices that would have any other bank shut down and its directors facing investigation by the authorities.
eBay do not make PayPal mandatory because it’s safer and more secure - they make it mandatory because eBay owns PayPal.
For further information, please google “PayPal horror stories”
July 4th, 2008 at 12:32 am
Wow..nice list of facts and figures. eBay constantly impresses me. They along with amazon seem to always be leading the field in new technologies. It’s staggering to think about how much goes on in their databases every minute. The must have some crew managing it.
Selling on eBay though keeps getting tougher. Terrific for consumers as it drives down values but when you think you have a rare book then jump on eBay and see 10 copies all listed for $2.00 ouch…just have to keep working harder.
Bruce