Reselling News: Etsy Cuts 220 Jobs, and eBay Ads Now Equal 2.7 Percent of Everything Sold

Earnings week is the one week a year the marketplaces tell the truth about their business, because the law makes them. This week eBay and Etsy both reported, and buried in the numbers are two things that change how a seller should think about ad spend and about which platform is worth building on.

Etsy laid off 220 people, about 12 percent of the company

Etsy announced the cuts on August 5 alongside its second quarter results. Roughly 220 roles are gone, most of them in product and engineering, and the company will be down to about 1,600 employees when it finishes. CEO Kruti Patel Goyal, who took the job at the start of this year, said the restructuring was not a cost-cutting move and was not driven by AI, and that "cost savings are a consequence of these changes, but they are not the objective." Etsy expects about 35 million dollars in charges and says the work wraps before the third quarter closes. CNBC and Retail Dive have the details.

This comes a week after Etsy finished selling Depop to eBay. So the company that just handed off its fastest-growing resale property also just cut an eighth of its staff, and cut it hardest in the teams that build seller tools.

What to do: nothing dramatic, but adjust your expectations. When product and engineering shrink, the things that follow are slower feature work, longer support queues, and more churn in the tooling you rely on. If Etsy is one of several places you list, keep it that way. If Etsy is your only storefront, this is a good month to get a second channel running so a platform reorganization is never your problem to absorb.

eBay's ad business is now 2.7 percent of everything sold on the site

eBay reported the same week. Gross merchandise volume hit 22.4 billion dollars, up 15 percent, and revenue came in at 3.1 billion dollars, also up 15 percent. The number worth writing down is advertising: 596 million dollars, or 2.7 percent of GMV.

Read that as a rate rather than a headline. Across the entire site, for every 100 dollars of merchandise that changed hands, about 2 dollars and 70 cents of it went to eBay as ad revenue. That is an average across sellers who advertise heavily and sellers who do not advertise at all, which means the sellers who do run ads are paying well above that rate. eBay has been growing this line for years and just posted another record quarter on it. Promoted Listings is not a promotion any more. It is a permanent layer of the fee structure that you either budget for or opt out of on purpose.

What to do: pull your own number. Take last month's ad spend, divide it by last month's sales, and see where you land against 2.7 percent. If you are well above it and your sell-through has not moved, your ad rate is doing the work that better photos, better titles, and better pricing should be doing. If you are at zero, you are choosing organic reach in a search result that increasingly puts promoted items first. Neither answer is wrong. Not knowing your number is.

A class action lands over the Beckett breach

For anyone selling graded cards, a proposed class action was filed on August 5 in federal court in New Mexico against Beckett Collectibles and Beckett Authentication Services over the data breach that surfaced in late 2025. The complaint alleges Beckett failed to secure customer data and withheld the scope of the incident, which grew across two data dumps to more than a million accounts including names, emails, phone numbers, and billing and shipping addresses. Value Added Resource has the filing.

What to do: if you have ever sent cards to Beckett for grading or authentication, treat your address and phone as public and be skeptical of any grading or shipping message that arrives out of the blue asking you to confirm something. Card sellers are a well-targeted group, and a leaked list of people who own graded cards is exactly what a phishing operation wants.

The takeaway

Both of this week's earnings reports say the same thing from different directions. The marketplaces are getting leaner and getting better at charging you for visibility, and neither trend reverses. The sellers who stay profitable through it are the ones who know their own numbers well enough to notice when a platform quietly starts taking more. Building that habit, month over month, is the work we do inside The Income Lab.