eBay's position in the ecommerce, retail, and payments landscapes continues to change as each of these sectors evolves. eBay's 1998 IPO occurred during the fabled "dot com bubble" and was influenced by many of the forces that made other technology and Internet IPOs so (in)famous. eBay's revenue growth was initially 30 percent or more year over year, making eBay one of the breakout winners of the dot com race.

In recently, eBay growth has slowed year over year, then with an increasing proportion of overall growth coming from its payments business and an ongoing process of reorganization and strategic change coming to characterize the marketplace business. Some of the declines and difficulty in this latter sector are due to increasing competition from competitors, most notably Amazon.com and Google. In a few year back, economic conditions have also taken a toll, with revenue, profit, listing volume, and share price all falling through 2008 and into 2009 before something of a turnaround took hold on the strength of new strategic orientations both in core businesses and marketplace platform structure, pricing, and policy.
The changes implemented during John Donahoe's tenure have proven to be controversial as shifts in rules and fees structures and an increased orientation toward high-volume, fixed-price retail channel selling have alienated portions of eBay's traditional community even as the competitive landscape around eBay stiffens. The recent turnaround in critical metrics was prefaced by a 2008 restructuring and a matching round of layoffs that appear to have served their purpose, at least for the moment. eBay's 2011 acquisition of GSI Commerce, Inc. for some $2.4 billion—eBay's largest acquisition since the $2.6 billion acquisition of Skype in 2005—may signal eBay's move into yet another core business area, that of major-brand and retail marketing, customer