Jamie Iannone
President and Chief Executive Officer at eBay
Thanks, Joe. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Today, I'll begin the call with key highlights from the second quarter. Then I'll share some updates on the progress towards our strategic vision. At the end of my remarks, I will turn the call over to Steve, our new CFO, who will discuss our financial performance and outlook in greater detail. The second quarter of 2021 marked several important milestones in the ongoing transformation of eBay, and I want to thank our team for making it happen. We've accelerated our pace of innovation while executing several complex transactions.
Their dedication and focus have created tremendous value for our customers and shareholders. Let me start with a few of our portfolio enhancements. We completed the transition of eBay's Classified business to Adevinta. This deal was originally valued at approximately $9.2 billion, but a closing in June had appreciated to $13.3 billion. Shortly after closing, we announced a deal with Permira to sell approximately 135 million of our Adevinta shares for over $2.4 billion. This agreement fulfills regulatory commitments while returning value to eBay shareholders. We also increased our share buyback plan for the year from $2 billion to $5 billion. In June, we announced the sale of over 80% of our Korean business to Emart for approximately $3 billion, bringing together two leading e-commerce and retail companies that can unlock significant potential in Korea.
We anticipate the deal will close either later this year or in early 2022. These portfolio changes allow us to intensify our focus on the core eBay business moving forward. When I spoke to you last July, I outlined a renewed vision and strategic plan for the company. We set out on a multiyear journey to become the best global marketplace for sellers and buyers, through a tech-led re-imagination. Our priorities were to grow the core, become the platform of choice for sellers and to cultivate life-long trusted relationships with buyers, by turning them into enthusiasts. To-date, our progress is very encouraging.
Our underlying growth is positive, and the strategy is working. Q2 results were strong and all key business metrics met or exceeded expectations. Revenue grew 11% driven by acceleration in the Payments migration and advertising growth. We funded incremental investments in product development while delivering $0.99 of non-GAAP EPS above the high-end of our range. As expected, GMV declined 11% when compared to last year when results were heavily impacted by the initial pandemic lockdown. Importantly, compared to pre-pandemic levels two years ago, we are seeing positive underlying GMV growth.
Our customer metrics remain healthy on both sides of our marketplace. Active sellers grew 5% to 19 million globally, as more small businesses and consumers continue to turn to eBay's global platform to reach millions of potential customers from around the world. This quarter, global active buyers totaled 159 million, down 2% versus last year, and up 3% versus 2019. We've been focused on building lifelong trusted relationships with enthusiast buyers. Changes in our marketing mix and product investments have been focused on attracting and retaining these enthusiasts particularly Gen Z and millennials.
In parallel, we've discontinued legacy tactics that led to low value, infrequent or one and done buyers. Our buyer base is starting to evolve based on this strategy. These high-volume buyers are growing compared to a year-ago and their spend on eBay is growing even faster. This higher-quality mix of buyers increases value for sellers and will lead to improved health of our ecosystem over the long-term. Moving on from buyer trends to Payments and Advertising initiatives continued to deliver a simpler product experience and meaningful benefits for sellers, buyers and shareholders. Managed Payments is now live in every market globally, and the transition is progressing faster than expected.
During the second quarter, we processed 71% of on-platform buying through managed Payments. We exited Q2 at a run rate over 80% and are on track to process over 90% this quarter. Managing the Payments experiences ourselves enables us to eliminate a pain point that sellers occasionally face on eBay, unpaid items. Changes to checkout have been made to address this issue and today 99% of fixed-price transactions are paid up front. We have also started to address this issue for best offers and options, by asking buyers to provide a Payment method in order to bid. This is a significant win for sellers, as it frees up inventory and reduces their post-transaction costs.
Our Advertising business continues to perform well. In Q2, ad revenue outpaced volume driven by Promoted Listings, which delivered almost $224 million, up 8%. More than 1.4 million sellers promoted over 430 million listings during the quarter. Growth was driven by higher adoption and technology improvements that increased conversion. We see tremendous growth opportunities in advertising, both from our existing Promoted Listings offerings, and from new product innovations. Following a number of successful trials in Q2, we are scaling several new products globally over the next few months. Previously, sellers could only promote fixed-price listings, but now they can increase visibility for a flat fee on options to increase conversion. In June, we also introduced a cost-per-click ad product to sellers in our major markets. Initial results from the first 100,000 listings showed that sellers' return on ad spend was higher than industry benchmarks.
We are placing more AI-powered recommendations for pricing and keyword bidding into the Seller Hub to help sellers drive particular volume. Finally, we're beginning to syndicate ads off eBay platforms to drive more buyers to listings. Importantly, sellers maintain control of pricing and visibility while benefiting from the scaled marketing capabilities of eBay. In addition to Advertising and Payments, we're driving a number of other site-wide initiatives. For consumer sellers, we're simplifying the selling process with a heavy focus on mobile. This includes easier label printing solutions in the app, and faster listings through image or bar code scans.
In trading cards where we first launched image-based listings sellers are able to match scans over 80% of the time. The time it takes to create a listing has been dramatically reduced and we plan to expand the capability to more product categories later this year. For small business sellers, we continue to expand and optimize their eBay toolkit. To help drive repeat business from enthusiasts to eBay stores, we built a CRM tool that enables sellers to fund and distribute their own coupons. Since launching a few months ago, over 1 million buyers have purchased items through these targeted campaigns.
As you've heard me say in the past, we are focused on a number of categories where we are well-positioned to serve both sellers and buyers. These categories are growing significantly faster than the overall business, and I'm delighted with the progress our team is making. Our innovation playbook has included increasing customer satisfaction, improving trust, growing supply and marketing to enthusiasts. As we exited Q2, we have applied this playbook to approximately 10% of our volume across our top three markets. With our current plan and ongoing momentum, we expect to expand coverage to approximately 20% by the end of the year.
One of these categories is trading cards. In North America, we continue to see substantial growth with approximately $2 billion of GMV in the first half of the year, equal to all of 2020. Despite these strong results, we see additional untapped potential in the market that we plan to capture with further innovation. We recently launched price guide and collection tools, aimed at trading card enthusiasts. These new features leverage unparalleled inventory and pricing data, allowing customers to view, manage and track the value of their collections in real-time. As a leader in trading cards with 25 years of transactional data, no one is better positioned to estimate the value of every card ever sold.
In addition, the collection tool seamlessly tracks all eBay activity and offline inventory in one place. This makes it easy for enthusiasts to assess opportunities, quickly trade and increase the value of their collections. Sneakers and watches continue to outgrow our overall marketplace. Since launching one year ago, we have authenticated nearly 1 million items enabling a game-changing level of trust. Both categories are seeing close to 90% customer satisfaction rates on authenticated transactions. Our Sneakers business saw strong double-digit growth despite tougher comps from a year-ago, and based on this success, we've expanded sneaker authentication to the UK, Canada, an Australia.
Luxury watches are also sustaining double-digit growth. Improved buyer trust is leading to strong cross-category shopping behavior similar to what we have seen in sneakers. In fact, luxury watch buyers spent 8,000 dollars on more than 50 items in other categories well-above the average eBay buyer. The next luxury category we are focused on is handbags. We plan to leverage a similar playback from watches and sneakers to deliver higher NPS for buyers and sellers. We've started in the U.S. for authenticating handbags over $500 for major brands. Refurbished electronics continues to be another area of growth across our largest markets.
Our Certified Refurbished experience is strengthening relationships with best-in-class brands by opening new sales channels. We recently welcomed Samsung Galaxy to the program, providing eBay buyers access to exclusive, like-new products at exceptional prices. Vehicles parts and accessories has historically been one of the strongest-performing categories on eBay, and remain so today. Our platform offers a wide inventory selection supported by a robust catalog. The Fitment shopping experience matches car parts to vehicles, to help buyers shop efficiently and confidently. In Q2 we expanded this capability by enabling a motorcycle parts finder in Germany and the UK.
We also expanded the My Garage feature, which allows buyers to store their vehicle data, leading to a more tailored shopping experience, to Canada, Italy, France and Spain. We plan to launch more technology-driven innovations in this category later this year to further build on our success. Taking a step back, eBay exists to create economic opportunity for all. That purpose guides our approach to our customers, our communities and our team at eBay. This year, our leadership team's individual goals focus on accelerating meaningful change in diversity, equity and inclusion, throughout every level of our company. We formed an ESG council, composed of senior leaders across the company whose role is to guide and ensure the success of sustainability initiatives.
During the quarter, we published our fifth annual Impact Report and third annual Diversity, Equity and Inclusion report detailing the progress we made in the past year as well as outlining our 2025 goals. The full list of activities is extensive, but I would like to share a few highlights. We made progress on our journey to be more diverse, equitable and inclusive. Our communities of inclusion have conducted 150 events with more than 10,000 attendees in the past year. We've also continued multiyear efforts to ensure gender pay equity, resulting in 100% pay parity in the U.S. and 99.7% globally. Another priority is managing our environmental impact.
Investing in clean energy is a focus for the company and our goal is to source 100% renewable energy by 2025. We have already reached 74% of our goal through a combination of power purchase agreements and local programs. Just last week, we announced that we are teaming up with McDonald's in an agreement with Lightsource bp to purchase power from Louisiana's largest solar project. The electricity produced will be greater than the power used at our largest data center. Finally, I would like to call out the incredible generosity of our buyers and sellers. During Q2, customers contributed over $35 million to their favorite causes through eBay for Charity.
This represented a 16% growth versus last year, and the platform is on track to hit the 2025 goal of raising $600 million. These are just a sample of the ongoing ESG-related activities and I encourage you to check out more at ebayinc.com. Q2 was another step forward in the multiyear transformation of eBay. The business delivered strong results and it's clear that our strategy is working. Customers are delighted with the innovation in our focus categories, leading divine growth despite tougher comps from a year-ago. We are harnessing the power of next-gen technology to make eBay the seller platform of choice and to attract lifelong enthusiasts.
Our Payments transition is nearly complete, delivering benefits to sellers, buyers and shareholders. Our advertising product portfolio is expanding, giving sellers more tools to grow their business, and we simplified our portfolio enabling us to focus on the core, while creating significant shareholder value. Our team continues to be relentlessly focused on executing for our customers. I'm delighted to welcome four new exceptional leaders to our executive team this year. In addition, we've hired critical talent in areas such as technology, AI, analytics and category management. The teams in place are well-positioned to propel this business forward.
With that, I'll turn the call over to Steve to provide more details on our financial performance. Before I do, I want to say how excited I am to have another world-class customer centric leader on our team to help us realize our vision.
Steve, over to you.
