Jamie Iannone
President and Chief Executive Officer at eBay
Thanks, Joe. Good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining us. Today, I will begin by sharing highlights since our last earnings call. Then I will focus on the near-term progress we are making towards our strategic vision, and finally, provide a short preview of our Investor Day in two weeks. At the end of my remarks, I will turn the call over to Steve who will discuss our financial performance and outlook in greater detail.
The fourth quarter marked another solid quarter for sellers and buyers on eBay. They benefited from investments in our strategy to drive sustainable growth on our marketplace. We are simplifying the seller and buyer experience, increasing customer satisfaction, and improving our underlying growth trajectory. Let me highlight few achievements from the quarter. We are seeing faster GMV growth in focused categories that now represent approximately 20% of global volume. We successfully completed our multi-year payments transition on time, with more customer benefit and with greater financial impact than expected. Our advertising business grew faster than marketplace volume, as more sellers adopted new ad products. We delivered revenue growth at the high end of our expectations and earnings growth above guidance.
And finally, we continue to execute our ESG agenda. In addition to being carbon-neutral, we made progress on our long-term sustainability target and eBay finished a record-breaking year. I am very pleased with our Q4 financial results, we delivered 5% revenue growth on the back of payments migration and Promoted Listings growth. We also delivered $1.05 of non-GAAP EPS more than the high end of expectations. For the full year, revenue was up 15% and non-GAAP EPS was up 21%.
As proud as I am of our team for delivering these results, I am more excited about eBay's future, based on the response from our customers to the strategy we are implementing. This is evident in focused categories. We are delivering best-in-class customer satisfaction and it is leading to faster GMV growth. In Q4 focused categories grew 15 points faster than the rest of the marketplace. The next category, we are focused on is motors parts & accessories or P&A for short. This is one of our largest categories globally and is full of enthusiasts who are passionate about what they trade on eBay. Many are very active buyers who shop in multiple categories with over 60% of the eBay spend coming on products outside P&A.
Starting in December, we began investing in top-of-funnel marketing across TV, radio, and social channels, in partnership with key industry influencers. These ads highlight the valuable choices P&A enthusiasts have on eBay across hundreds of millions of listings. In addition, we implemented monetization changes to higher-priced items and saw an increase in listings during Q4. We are leveraging the scale of our supply in new ways with input from our P&A sellers, we simplified our global category structure. This makes it easier for buyers to find unique parts from around the world, unlocking more cross-border trade. These initial changes led to modestly better performance in P&A GMV during Q4 relative to the overall business. It's early days and we plan to make further investments this year to improve our trajectory in this category.
In focused categories where we have been investing for several quarters, we have seen growth sustain at higher levels. Sneakers over $100 continue to grow double-digits globally. Our success in the U.S. is being replicated in other major markets. Part of that success is authentication, which has scaled to five countries over the past year, and in Q4, we started authenticating cross-border transactions into the U.S. But we are not stopping there, last quarter we acquired Sneaker Con, a leading authenticater with operations in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and Germany. By bringing additional capacity in-house, we increased the scale and flexibility of our operations.
We also introduced 3D true view on select listings. This capability increases trusted buyers shopping for unique high value, pre-owned items. Given our success in driving customer satisfaction to over 90% and sustained double-digit GMV growth, we have reintroduced monetization in the U.S. for sneakers over $100. The initial customer feedback has been encouraging as sellers continue to benefit from a lower take rate than many other platforms. Sellers are also listening more luxury watches on eBay. We saw a double-digit increase in supply quarter-over-quarter and total GMV in this category continues to grow at strong double-digit rates in the U.S. In Germany and the U.K., authentication is also leading to higher customer satisfaction.
In luxury handbags, we saw acceleration in Q4 to positive double-digit growth in the U.S., based on the success of Authenticity Guarantee, we are growing the number of brands covered by the program. In addition, we have expanded selection by authenticating cross-border imports from Japan, a key source of unique inventory. And just a few weeks ago, we announced Authenticity Guarantee for all single ungraded trading cards sold for over $750 in the U.S. We plan to expand this offering to include grade in, autograph, and patch cards sold for more than $250 later this year.
As we exited 2021, our Certified Refurbished program had expanded to over 320 brands. This program now includes brands like Microsoft, Dyson, Samsung Galaxy, and KitchenAid. And as a reminder, these products are certified by the manufacturer are like new and are backed by a two-year warranty and eBay's Money Back Guarantee.
Higher trust has increased customer satisfaction and accelerated GMV to positive double-digit rates. Certified Refurbished products from top brands make up the small percentage of the total refurb activity on eBay, but are growing significantly faster. This has inspired us to expand further and in November we announced eBay Refurbished, a destination for like new products. This expanded experience [Technical Issues] has more inventory from top-rated sellers. These trusted sellers are thoroughly vetted to rigorous performance standards, so buyers can purchase with even greater confidence. In Q4 we saw promising early results from this expansion in mobile phones and plan to extend to tablets, smart watches, and laptops this year.
In addition to improvements in focused categories, we made a number of changes during Q4 that benefitted sellers and buyers across all categories globally. We have started a pilot with our API sellers to add video to their listings. To date, we have seen hundreds of thousands of listings add video content. Buyers get a rich shopping experience on individual item pages and in seller stores. Looking ahead, we plan to enable more sellers to tell their story by adding videos to additional listing products.
Another new growth capability we are scaling for sellers is coded coupons. Since launch, sellers have realized over $350 million in GMV. Over 60,000 sellers have driven weekly purchases from almost 6 million buyers. Buyer trust is essential on a third-party marketplace and is an area of focus for our technology investment. In Q4, we leveraged artificial intelligence to significantly decrease the time to detect and remove counterfeits. In the categories where it has been deployed to date, most listings are removed before a buyer has a chance to see it. These are a few recent examples of how we are using technology to increase trust, while simplifying seller and buyer experiences.
Moving on to payments. In Q4, we completed the transition to a modern payments platform by migrating all remaining sellers away from the legacy system. This has resulted in a simpler seller experience, lower fees for most sellers, more choice for buyers, and better-than-expected financial results. Although this marks the culmination of a major multi-year effort, in reality this is just the beginning. By managing seller and buyer money flows, we can remove transactional friction and provide more trusted services. We have been systematically eliminating unpaid items, which removed friction for approximately 10 million transactions in 2021.
In addition, sellers are being paid faster for weekend sales in most major markets. We are also exploring new ways to allow sellers and buyers to benefit from our scale. In the U.S., we recently launched a partnership with Chase Freedom rewards that increases top of funnel impressions, driving buyer traffic to eBay. We are excited by the value payments has provided our seller and buyer community and we see more growth opportunities ahead.
Moving to advertising. In Q4 ad revenue growth once again outpaced volume due to Promoted Listings, driving approximately $227 million in revenue, up 4%. Adoption grew at double-digit rates in both the number of sellers and the number of listings promoted. Looking at the full year, our advertising business, including both first-party and third-party ad products surpassed $1 billion, up 9%. The drive in net growth cycle and advertising, we expanded the rollout of new products to more sellers and markets during the quarter. PL Express, our auction listings product was fully launched to all major markets. We also integrated this feature into more listening tools to drive further adoption.
For PL Advanced, our cost-per-click offering, we opened access to AI driven recommendations for keywords and bid pricing. While this product remains in a limited beta as we optimize the customer experience, we are increasing exposure and streamlining reporting for sellers. For external Promoted Listings, we continue to ramp more affiliate traffic through the eBay partner network. We also increased traffic from external paid search to Promoted Listings in European markets. Participating sellers are seeing increased traffic and conversion, while maintaining control over ad pricing.
We have carefully meter the rollout of these new products, while balancing impact to our buyer experience, despite the limited release new ad products provide a material contribution to Promoted Listings revenue growth in Q4. We expect this to accelerate in the coming quarters as availability and adoption of these new product increases.
Another area where we made significant progress last year was in Recommerce. Volume of preloved products grew faster than new products in 2021, driven by demand from younger consumers. For the full year, we delivered $2.7 billion of GMV in three preloved electronics and apparel in the U.S., U.K. and Canada. In addition to providing customers great value on unique used goods, Recommerce activity also help to meet our sustainability goals. These purchases reduced carbon emissions by approximately 540,000 metric tons in 2021.
EBay is a carbon-neutral company and I am thrilled by the recognition we recently received as a sustainability leader in e-commerce. For the third year running, eBay has made the Dow Jones Sustainability World and North American indices, putting us in the top 10% of its companies in our industry globally. eBay was also included in JUST Capital and CNBC's Just 100 Best. This list measures corporate performance and efforts in areas such as climate change, DE&I and employee wellness. When compared to nearly 1,000 companies, eBay ranked 88th overall and fourth in retail when it comes to minimizing our environmental impact. I am really proud of the progress our team is making here.
The eBay community continues to demonstrate its tremendous generosity. In Q4 eBay for Charity enabled sellers and buyers to raise almost $37 million, up 6%. And for the year customers raised over $145 million, up 18%, the most raise since we started this program almost 20 years ago. Lastly, we were honored this year to receive Glassdoor's 2022 Employees Choice Award. This award reflect the anonymous feedback from current and former employees, regarding topics such as career opportunities, culture and values, and diversity inclusion, just to name a few. We are truly honored to be recognized by the people who make eBay, the company it is.
Now, I would like to talk about our upcoming Investor Day on March 10th. In July of 2020, I outlined a clear vision of a winning strategy for the company. At that time, we increased our focus on sellers and buyers, accelerated the pace of innovation, simplified the portfolio and revamped the leadership team. We also drove successful multi-year initiatives in payments and advertising, both of which exceeded ambitious targets. This unprecedented level of change in eBay all happened in parallel with a global pandemic that massively disrupted short-term consumer behavior.
The early results have demonstrated that our strategy is working and the business is stronger than it was before the pandemic. Our focused categories are returning to market rates of growth. We are empowering sellers by simplifying their experience, saving them money, and providing tools to accelerate their growth. Our technology investments are driving a simpler and more sustainable marketplace.
Looking ahead, we are excited for the next few years as we build on the momentum we have established. I look forward to introducing you to our world-class leadership team and sharing more about our plans, along with a few new initiatives, we will unveil at Investor Day. We have our eyes squarely focused on deepening our relationship with sellers and buyers in building the world's most sustainable marketplace for the eBay community.
In closing, I would like to sincerely thank our extraordinary employees for an amazing year. They completed a huge payments transition, executed two large dispositions and improved the underlying growth of our business, delivered tremendous sustainability results and supported sellers and buyers during these challenging times.
With that, I will turn the call over to Steve to provide more details on our financial performance. Steve, over to you.