With eBay Inc. spinning off PayPal and eBay Enterprise later in the year, here’s some interesting news: eBay (as in the marketplaces bit) has created a payments team and is hiring talent from Apple apparently with the express purpose of developing payments technology.
First of all, chief product officer RJ Pittman (a 2013 hire from Apple) has been charged with leading a new payments unit within eBay and he has poached Bora Chung from Apple (she is also a PayPal veteran). SFgate.com reported this story and has more details.
This raises lots of questions. Could it be that eBay will be ditching PayPal post divorce to bring payments on the marketplace back in-house? It would be a bold move and potentially a huge disruption to sellers. And it would be impossible to imagine that eBay could launch anything before the split occurs in the third quarter of this year.
And it does, of course, put into relief the decision to spin off PayPal in the first place. If eBay needs a payments division, why sell off the best one in the world? Oh wait. Shareholder value.
5 Responses
Best advice for any sellers is to find additional sites to sell on besides Ebay.
Develop your own lifeboats before the Ebay ship sinks and drags you under as well.
Remember, Dan is right that the primary concern of Ebay is shareholder value.
As a seller, Ebay doesn’t care whether you live or die.
Ebay need to do this.Once Paypal is listed on the stock market it can be taken over.There would be nothing stopping Amazon or Google or Alibaba buying Paypal and then stopping Ebay from being able to use it.
If Ebay lost Paypal they would be out of business the same day.
They should never be splitting the company.It might increase shareholder value but it also contains a massive risk.
I’m waiting for the announcement that ebay has been sold to Alibaba. Why compete when you can buy up the opposition?