eBay Inc (NASDAQ:EBAY) CEO Devin Wenig believes that the restructuring of the retail industry will happen faster than a lot of people think. Talking in CNBC’s “Closing Bell” from the Shoptalk Conference in Las Vegas, Wenig said that the fourth quarter of last holiday season “was an inflection point where that was the end of retail as we know it.”
“The fourth quarter is the moment that people will look back on and say, ‘That’s when the current structure of the industry was irretrievable,'” Wenig told CNBC.
He thinks that we are going “to see drastic changes in store footprints and what stores do.”
eBay Inc (NASDAQ:EBAY) made impartments to its search and homepage personalization. The retailer had a strong holiday season. During the quarter, eBay added two million active buyers across its platforms for a total of 167 million global active buyers. The company’s fourth-quarter revenue rose 3.1% to $2.4 billion and its marketplace revenue was up 4% in the quarter on a currency-neutral basis and flat on an as-reported basis.
“Q4 was a record quarter highlighted by solid performance in our eBay business. During the holiday season, eBay was one of the top consumer shopping destinations in the world and the second most visited eCommerce site in the U.S.,” Wenig said in an earnings release.
Wenig said that people still need stores and he does not think stores are completely going away. However, he thinks that stores must be a “mini distribution center” to succeed.
“I think the complete death of stores has been greatly exaggerated,” Wenig said. “The consumer wants stores. The entire world will not be online. But there are both capacity and utility issues in retail. People don’t like poor store experiences.”
eBay Inc (NASDAQ:EBAY) has launched a three-day delivery for 20 million eligible items in the United States. Millions of those items will ship for free.
“Most people shop eBay in their passions and their interests — as much as the things they need, the things they love,” Wenig said. “But we know that there’s a group of our buyer segment that wants certainty. They want speed.”
eBay is also looking for opportunities in emerging markets including India.
“The Indian market is important to us,” Wenig said. “We’re always looking at the possibilities to win in every market we compete in. But eBay India is a major player in that market, and we are investing in it, and we’ll continue to invest in it.”
‘Birth of a Re-Imagined Retail Industry’
Jack Ma, group executive chairman of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (NYSE:BABA), said he sees “the birth of a re-imagined retail industry in the coming years,” driven by the integration of online, offline, logistics and data across a single value chain.
In a letter to shareholders last October, Mr. Ma said that traditional e-commerce business is undergoing rapid change and progress. He believes that pure e-commerce players are soon going to face tremendous challenges.
