eBay Classifieds Emerging Markets
Rebuilding Forecasting Models for a Global Crisis
COVID-era forecasting rebuild — gave CFOs and GMs a credible planning baseline when standard models broke.
Founder’s track record · as Head of Analytics for eBay Classifieds Emerging Markets. The in-house operator experience Clarivant is built on.
- scenario refresh as real recovery patterns emerged
- Weekly
- scenario refresh as real recovery patterns emerged
The starting point
When lockdowns hit in March 2020, every forecasting model at eBay Classifieds Emerging Markets became useless overnight — viewings stopped, dealership traffic vanished, and years of steady-growth training data described nothing like a pandemic. Finance was making multi-million-dollar calls across five markets blind.
The method
We threw out the old models and built for speed and scenario flexibility, not precision. A ‘no-COVID baseline’ projected where each market and category would have been without the shock, becoming the reference point for impact and recovery. Tableau scenario models toggled V-, U-, and L-shaped recovery, calibrated per market and category, refreshed every Monday with the prior week’s actuals for the Wednesday finance review.
The result
The models didn’t predict the pandemic — nothing could — but they gave the CFO and GMs a structured way to allocate under extreme uncertainty: maintain investment where the base case broke even soon, pull back where recovery was distant. They supported planning across 5+ markets through the most volatile period in the company’s history, and the ‘no-COVID baseline’ became the standard way to measure impact.