A very small number of employees in eBay’s Seattle-area office have been impacted by a round of layoffs, aiming to eliminate 7 percent of the online retailer’s global workforce.
The layoffs, which started on Monday, are being conducted in advance of the company’s split from PayPal. A source familiar with the situation said “a very small number” of eBay’s roughly 400 employees in Bellevue, Wash., were affected.
As previously announced, the 2,400 layoffs were expected to occur across the board at all three of the company’s divisions: eBay Marketplaces, PayPal, and eBay Enterprise.
When the layoffs were announced last month, an eBay spokeswoman told GeekWire that it had no plans to target remote offices disproportionately. That appears to be the case, with another spokeswoman adding that the San Jose-based company “remains committed to the Seattle area.”
“In our Q4 earnings a few weeks ago we announced that we plan to eliminate approximately 2,400 positions, or about 7% of our global workforce,” said eBay spokeswoman Abby Smith. “This was a difficult decision, but is intended to simplify the organizations, reduce complexity, speed decision-making and create competitive cost structures. We remain committed to the Seattle area.”
An eBay careers page still lists more than a dozen openings in the Bellevue office, with some job listings posted as recently as this Monday and Friday of last week. Bellevue employees work on a number of data-related initiatives, ranging from optimizing marketing placements to research.
The Bellevue office has seen some turnover. The original general manager Ken Moss left last summer to become chief technology officer at Electronic Arts. His replacement, Peter Mansour, left shortly after to become president of InfoSpace. The current general manager is Mike Fridgen, who joined eBay after it acquired Seattle-based Decide.com, where he was president and CEO.
eBay also has an increasingly large presence in Portland, where it is focused, in part, on mobile development. It is not clear how many employees were affected there.
