eBay rolls out lending to UK SMBs: The ecommerce giant is partnering with embedded finance platform YouLend to extend loans to its sellers—giving the former a chance to make itself stickier for platform sellers and the latter access to data and loan growth.

eBay seeks to plug small business financing gap with an embedded lending product for its UK SMB sellers. eBay and other ecommerce firms will likely add more financial services, like accounting solutions, to better serve their user bases.

Even before the pandemic, ecommerce channel advertising was attracting a lot of attention from advertisers—especially in verticals like consumer packaged goods (CPG)—as well as retailers, which hoped to add new higher-margin revenue streams to their businesses after seeing Amazon’s success in the area. Amazon had become the No. 3 digital ad seller in the US thanks primarily to placements on its ecommerce property, and companies including Walmart, Target, and eBay had been growing similar businesses.

Our latest forecast shows that Amazon, Walmart, and eBay will remain the top three largest ecommerce companies in the US by total sales volume, while Best Buy and Target will usurp The Home Depot and Wayfair for the No. 5 and No. 6 spots on the 2021 list, respectively.

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The 2020 holiday season’s unprecedented ecommerce surge helped total US retail spending remain positive, setting the tone for healthy outlook for 2021 holiday season growth.

In Spain, 82% of digital buyers polled by Elogia for Tandem UP in February 2020 said they purchased items on Amazon. eBay was No. 2 at 44%, and AliExpress came in third, at 43%.

Walmart (18.0% of app users), Wish (14.7%), eBay (13.8%), and Target (8.3%) rounded out the top five. Target requires curbside pickup users to download its app, a smart strategy to drive downloads given the popularity of this offering. Retailers can offer exclusive early access to doorbusters for app users or other incentives that give reason to download.

Kristina has previously held positions at Adify, Mirago, and eBay. Moderator. Nancy Taffera-Santos is senior vice president of media solutions and strategy at eMarketer. Nancy has been at eMarketer for over 13 years and oversees the media business, developing programs for leading advertisers.

PayPal, which launched checkout with crypto earlier this year, anticipates hitting $200 million in crypto volume within “months,” for example, and more merchants, including eBay, are exploring crypto acceptance.