We spend a lot of time in TDV talking about Bring a Trailer, Cars & Bids, Collecting Cars, Hagerty, Car & Classic etc.. and the traditional auction houses, and rightly so. They are where a huge amount of the collector-car action is happening, and watching cars, sellers and buyers move between them tells us a lot about where the market is going.

But I think there are a couple of sleeping giants we do not talk about nearly enough.

The first is eBay.

Yesterday, eBay held its first Live car auction, selling four cars from Exotic Knights. A 2016 BMW M4 GTS sold for $82,900, a 2017 Mercedes-AMG G 63 for $62,100, a 2020 Shelby GT500 for $98,300 and a 2023 Aston Martin Vantage F1 Edition for $145,800, for a combined $389,100.

I am not going to pretend those were incredible results. They were not. There is plenty eBay can improve with the Live product, and frankly there is plenty they can improve across their normal vehicle listings too if they want serious collector-car buyers to trust the platform with increasingly expensive cars.

But four results from the first Live auction are not really the story here.

If you have been following what eBay has been doing with vehicles, they are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. At the end of Q1, eBay said its Vehicles business had reached an annualized GMV run rate in the hundreds of millions of dollars, with the company saying the category was continuing to scale month over month as it expanded beyond private sellers and into smaller dealerships.

Earlier this year, a Porsche Carrera GT sold through eBay for close to $5 million. Now they are taking Live, a format they have already been pushing heavily in watches, collectibles and other enthusiast categories, and applying it to cars.

Put those things together and I think there is a much bigger opportunity here than yesterday's four cars would suggest.

eBay already has something most companies trying to enter collector cars do not, an enormous automotive audience. It has buyers, sellers, dealers, auctions, decades of automotive history on the platform and one of the biggest parts and accessories businesses anywhere. The enthusiast who buys the car can stay inside the eBay ecosystem long after the transaction itself is finished.

What eBay has not historically controlled is the whole car transaction. That is changing.

eBay bought Caramel last year, and I do not think that acquisition gets enough attention in this context. Caramel was built to handle much of the messy part of buying a car online, including paperwork, ownership transfer, financing and transportation. If you have used Bring a Trailer's Verified Checkout, you have already seen Caramel in action there too, which makes this especially relevant to the collector-car market.

That matters because the difficult part of buying an expensive car online has never really been pressing the bid button. It is everything around it. Is the seller legitimate? Is the title clean? Where is the money going? How is the paperwork handled? Can the buyer finance the car? How does a car sitting in Florida get to someone in California without the buyer having to stitch the whole transaction together himself?

The more of that eBay can control, the more the business starts looking like something very different from the old version of eBay Motors, where the platform helped the buyer and seller find each other and then largely left them to work the rest out. In effect, eBay now owns a piece of the same transaction infrastructure already being used by one of the most important collector-car marketplaces in the world.

But buying the infrastructure is not the same as perfecting the experience.

Spend a little time reading recent Caramel customer feedback and you will find complaints around communication, financing delays, document handling and transactions getting stuck. It’s pretty clear speaking to many that have used it, that the plumbing still needs work.

That actually makes the opportunity more interesting to me, not less. The infrastructure is there. The execution still has room to improve.

Live is another layer on top of that, and the format itself makes sense for collector cars because there is actually something worth talking about. A seller can walk around the car, start it, show the interior and underside, pull out the service records, explain the ownership history, answer questions and point out the flaws in real time. Done properly, that can create a much stronger connection between the buyer and the car than a static listing page ever could.

But putting a dealer listing into a livestream does not automatically make it a collector-car product. This is where eBay still has work to do.

Collector-car buyers have been trained by the specialist platforms to expect a huge amount of information before bidding. They want detailed photography, service records, cold-start videos, underbody shots, paintwork disclosures, documentation, modification history, known flaws and knowledgeable commentary. They also want other enthusiasts crawling all over the listing and pointing out the detail everyone else missed.

That scrutiny creates trust, and trust is probably the single biggest thing eBay still needs to build if it wants a meaningful share of the higher end of the market.

Some of its vehicle listings still feel more like dealer classifieds than collector-car presentations, and putting the same inventory into a Live auction does not solve the underlying problem. Before a car ever goes live, eBay should already know whether the photography is weak, whether important documentation is missing, whether comparable cars have historically struggled with reserve and whether the audience being brought into the room is actually the right audience for that particular car.

It should also be doing a much better job of helping buyers and sellers understand the market around the car.

Not by spitting out a fake single-number valuation and pretending that solves everything, but by showing the right comparable sales, how mileage and specification affected those results, what similar cars did with and without reserve, whether the current ask sits above or below the pattern in recent transactions and how much evidence actually exists for any of those conclusions.

That is the part I think gets really interesting.

Collector-car marketplaces have spent years accumulating transaction data, but most of that data still sits behind the listing rather than actively helping the buyer or seller make a decision. The next generation of these marketplaces should not simply host the transaction. They should help both sides understand the market around the car before the transaction happens.

A seller should not have to guess whether a reserve is sensible, whether the asking number has any support or whether the closest comparable is actually comparable. A buyer should not have to open six tabs and manually reconstruct the market before deciding how hard to bid.

Most of this is measurable. You can identify which presentation details actually change bidding, which disclosures correlate with stronger sell-through, when an auction is attracting genuine buyers rather than simply attention, how similar cars have behaved under different sale structures and where a car is likely to struggle before it ever goes live.

That does not mean data suddenly tells you what every car is "worth." Collector cars are too individual for that. It does mean a platform with enough transaction history should be able to give both sides far better context than they get today.

And eBay has no shortage of data. That is why I keep coming back to the idea of a sleeping giant.

The hard part in any marketplace is usually getting enough buyers and sellers together to create liquidity. eBay already has them. What it needs is a better collector-car product around that audience, with stronger presentation, better trust, better transaction execution and much smarter use of the data sitting underneath the marketplace.

If it can get those pieces right, Live becomes much more than another way to watch a car sell.

We naturally focus on BaT versus Cars & Bids and all the online platforms versus the traditional houses, and which platform is winning which consignments, because those are the companies directly fighting one another today. But the companies that ultimately take a meaningful piece of the online collector-car transaction may not all come from inside the collector-car world.

eBay's advantage is scale, but scale alone is not enough. The real challenge is matching the right car, the right seller and the right buyer while reducing the friction between hammer and handover.

And eBay is not the only sleeping giant. Amazon is quietly moving in the same general direction.

Amazon Autos launched in late 2024 and now works with more than 1,000 participating dealers across more than 130 U.S. cities, selling new, used and certified pre-owned vehicles while allowing customers to compare financing and complete much of the transaction online.

Today, Amazon Autos is not a collector-car marketplace. It is primarily local, dealer-led and built around making the purchase of a normal car simpler. I would not pretend Amazon is about to start auctioning 300SLs next week.

But again, looking only at the product as it exists today misses what is being assembled underneath it.

Amazon already has dealer inventory, financing, checkout, trade-ins, protection products, one of the largest advertising businesses in the world, Amazon Live, Prime Video, Twitch and a customer base trained to transact online.

Today that infrastructure might help someone buy a Hyundai sitting 20 miles away. There is no fundamental reason a future version could not help someone buy a 911 Turbo sitting 2,000 miles away, particularly if Amazon eventually opens the platform more widely to specialist and independent dealers.

Collector cars would require a very different product. The cars are national rather than local, condition matters enormously, the seller base is different and the transaction needs far more documentation and trust.

But those are product problems, not impossible problems. That is the bigger point.

For years, collector-car marketplaces have largely existed in their own corner of the internet. The specialist platforms built communities around the cars, created trust, taught buyers to transact online and proved that six and seven-figure vehicles could be sold digitally at scale.

Now some of the biggest commerce companies in the world are beginning to assemble many of the same pieces from the opposite direction.

The specialists have the culture, the audience and the credibility within the collector world. The giants have scale, payments, financing, logistics, advertising and enormous existing customer bases.

That does not mean eBay or Amazon are suddenly going to replace BaT. They are a long way from that, and the specialist platforms have built things that are genuinely difficult to replicate, particularly trust and community.

But it does mean the competitive landscape may eventually become much broader than the handful of names we usually talk about.

Yesterday's four eBay Live sales were not a revolution, and the results were not strong enough on their own to prove anything. What they were, was another sign that eBay is taking vehicles more seriously, that it wants to own more of the transaction and that it is experimenting with formats that could make automotive shopping much more engaging.

We spend a lot of time watching the companies already fighting for the collector-car pie.

It may be worth spending a little more time watching the giants quietly walking toward the table.

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