Our overall purpose as a business is to create economic opportunity. That is the baseline for our actions on behalf of the benefits we want to deliver to our various communities, which include the community in which we live, the legislators and organizations that are dealing with the crisis, and the charities we support.
Of course, we strive always to make the right choices for our employees day in and day out. And, most critically, we want to ensure the best outcomes for our sellers, who are galvanizing to support their fellow neighbors around the world, contribute to virus relief efforts and share tips to stay safe, informed and connected.
We have made commitments on several different fronts. We are deferring payments and enabling sellers to manage their cash flow easier. We are onboarding new brick-and-mortar sellers that weren’t on our platform before but suddenly found their doors closed, providing new-store setups to bring their inventory onto eBay. This is a global effort, with an approach tailored to help our seller access buyers in over 190 countries.
In the U.S., our most significant effort is to enable a business to open on eBay basically free right out of the gate. It may surprise you to learn that 70% of businesses have no online presence. So, they’ve been disproportionately impacted by this pandemic. If you are a small shop in a local community with an enterprise that is not considered essential, you can now create a storefront on eBay and we cover that cost. In addition, there are no selling fees until the end of June.
Many of our sellers also use our platform to fund community outreach, like the seller in Atlanta who uses all the money she raises on eBay to feed people in her community. She is their food bank. We also have taken on matches internally for different charities by doubling any donations by our employees.
In the midst of this terrible challenge, there is light. We’ve become a lot more emphatic and real with each other. We always talk about trying to find harmony between work and home life. And now we have to. There is more understanding of what we can be and all of us, not just women, are part of that solution.
In that effort, we can access unparalleled support through SeeHer, which makes us smarter about our efforts and how to think with a more unbiased intent, educating us constantly as to what others are doing and doing well to eliminate unconscious gender bias and how we portray women.
It is up to each and every one of us to keep that momentum moving forward.
