Corporate Sustainability at Ebay

An analysis of eBay Inc

& its corporate sustainability activities.

Table of contents:

Introduction

Drivers of eBay’s sustainability activites

i) The founding principle

ii) Employees & users

iii) Response led

eBay’s sustainable activities

i) Charitable giving

ii) eBay Green Team

iii) Social Initiatives

iv) Marketing

v) Using the eBay voice

vi) Reducing eBay’s carbon footprint

Drivers for eBay’s sustainability policies

Personal Impressions

Introduction

eBay Inc was founded in 1995, and connects buyers and sellers through eBay, the world’s largest online marketplace, and PayPal which enables individuals and businesses to send and receive payments. Since 1995, the eBay website has built a community of 97million buyers and sellers (’active users’), whose trades add up to $16.5bn per year. Revenue for the company was $11.7bn in 2011, with net revenue of $3.2bn.

My interest is researching the corporate sustainabilty activities of eBay Inc is based on my experience of working for the company in the UK for five years. While not directly working on any CSR initiatives, I was constantly aware of the importance of these at all levels of the company.

eBay corporate sustainability initiatives are plentiful and varied, and while it would take pages to list them all, below I have tried to disseminate the drivers and activities that outline what an important and fundamental part this is of the company ethos.

[NB: The majority of eBay’s corporate sustainability intiatives are led from the eBay website team, but require full support from the suite of companies that the eBay Inc umbrella includes. In the below analysis, I will mainly use the term ’eBay’, but in many cases, the initiaves would not exist without, for example, the functionality of PayPal.]

Drivers of eBays’ sustainability activities

i) The founding principle

„We never set out to be a green business, we realized it’s intrinsic”...