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I posted this in another thread as well that touched on this subject among others, but thought it might be useful to copy it here too since this thread is specifically about this coupon.
The reason eBay has tied it to using your balance is it helps boost a particular metric that matters to them (and their investors). For ~4 years now, current eBay management has been pushing their "enthusiast buyer, focus vertical strategy" (the reason for all the emphasis on sneakers, trading cards, handbags, watches, Motors, etc.) and has been desperately trying to convince investors this strategy is working.
Toward that purpose, eBay has defined "enthusiast buyers" as those who shop on eBay at least 6 times per year, spend at least $800 per year or those who also sell on the site.
The idea was originally cooked up as a way to counter concerns that overall Active Buyer stats had dropped significantly to below Q1 2018 levels.
By designating some segment as "high value enthusiast buyers" and showing growth in that segment due to authentication programs, additional marketing campaigns etc., eBay was able to to spin the story such that while yes, they may be losing some buyers, those were mostly buyers who only shopped very rarely, didn't spend much money etc. and therefor their loss is no big deal because the truly "valuable" buyers are still shopping here and growing.
And that worked, for a while in 2021-2022 when that segment was still growing on eBay with not insignificant help from the larger pandemic ecommerce boom.
But in Q4 2022, the number of "enthusiast buyers" dropped from ~17 Million to ~16 Million - which is where it has stayed since.
Slide from Q3 2024 earnings presentation:
The fact that "enthusiast buyers" has been stagnant for almost 2 years now has started to raise investor concerns that eBay may have gotten all the extra value out of the "focus vertical strategy" that they could and they've hit the wall in terms of growth in that area.
So eBay is under pressure to make that "enthusiast buyer" stat go back up on the Q4 report and very specific discounts that push the buttons to count for that stat are the fastest way to do it - meaning the offer has to be something that will increase the number of repeat purchases, increase spend to at least $800 per year or convert sellers into buyers.
Driving repeat purchases within such a short period of time is the more difficult of the 3 criteria - people who have only bought once or twice through the whole year are going to need a big push to get them to buy 4-5 more times in 3 months, even if that is slightly helped by the holiday gift giving season.
Increasing amount spent is a little easier, but more likely to be targeted at new consumer goods items or electronics refurbished by authorized sellers - and in the US at least I've seen eBay working in conjunction with those kinds of sellers to offer discounts based on pricing tiers that are definitely geared toward getting people to make higher dollar purchases to "save" more.
But that is a double edged sword as investors are also sensitive to heavy discounting as it was a favored tactic of previous eBay leadership that proved to be pretty disastrous for a bunch of reasons I won't get into here because this is already long enough 😂.
So that leaves the last criteria - buyers who also sell - and eBay has apparently found ways to pull that lever to convert some of the new consumer to consumer/private sellers on the platform into buyers, magically increasing the "enthusiast buyer" rate for the next report.
In the US, where Spendable Funds/eBay Balance is not mandatory, they've done it by offering coupons like this:
In the UK where they've mandated eBay Balance for private C2C sellers, it's much simpler - just tie the coupon to using eBay Balance which can only be gained by being a seller and again, magically the number of "enthusiast buyers" goes up.
It's all shell game really but that along with the additional $3B in stock buybacks will probably be enough to keep investors relatively happy for at least another quarter.
