Meet the season’s Early Gifters on eBay

This holiday season is all about gift-giving. As your consumers spend more time at home and shift their budgets away from outdoor experiences and big travel, gifting is taking center stage. At the same time, shoppers are doing most of their browsing online. They’re starting earlier than last year to ensure packages arrive in time for special celebrations, and they’re shopping on eBay to find the perfect gift for each loved one.

In the spirit of giving, we’re sharing our first-party, real intent data about audiences important to you this holiday – starting with the Early Gifter. We hope these insights will help you get to know your shoppers more deeply, so you can meet them when and where they’re shopping this season.

What you need to know about the Early Gifter 

eBay’s Early Gifter audience is made up of 258,000 shoppers with real purchase intent. They make more than 1.5 million purchases per month on average during the holidays, or about 6 per month per user. 

Though Early Gifters make a large volume of purchases, they typically take their time – 32 days, to be exact – to find the right item. And these shoppers spend 15 minutes browsing each time they visit the eBay marketplace.

So what are Early Gifters looking for? Their top searched keywords during the holidays include Baby Yoda, vintage, Michael Kors, Rolex, Hot Wheels, and Lego. In terms of categories shopped, Early Gifters are five times more likely to purchase Beanbag Plushies during the holiday season compared to the rest of the year. And they’re twice as likely to purchase Vintage & Antique Jewelry, and Diecast & Toy Vehicles. Holiday and Seasonal Collectible purchases grow by 76% during this time.

What does this mean for advertisers looking to reach Early Gifters?

If you want to engage Early Gifters, it’s important to act now. 31% of online consumers have already started shopping, and marketplaces like eBay are the best place to meet them. Why? Because shoppers come to eCommerce platforms intending to make a purchase, you’ll get to follow new trends as they happen. 

The beauty of eBay’s first-party data is that it lets you dig deep into the shopper journey, from the moment they enter the marketplace to the moment they click “Checkout.” Understanding a consumer’s path to purchase lets you decide the right times to deliver your message. Since we know an Early Gifter takes 32 days to make a purchase, for example, we might serve them an ad on day 30 when they’re most likely to make a purchase. Additionally, uncovering keywords shoppers use at different points in their journey, and right before converting, are meaningful ways to optimize your campaigns. 

As you get to know the Early Gifter more deeply, we’ll deliver ads with precision right when and where they’re looking for a gift. Our innovative server-to-server audience targeting technology creates dynamic and always-relevant audiences that you can connect with in realtime, every time. That means you won’t miss a single shopping moment during the busiest season of the year.


eBay’s hundreds of audiences are shopping with real intent and cheer this season. Get to know your shoppers better than ever before, while driving campaign scale, engagement, and ROI. Let’s work together.