With the impending divorce of eBay and PayPal coming in the third quarter of 2015, it seems there are a number of rumours doing the rounds about whether eBay marketplaces is planning job cuts in anticipation of making it a more attractive buy out object.
The Wall Street Journal leads the way with claims that about 10% of the workforce could be laid off. That’s about 3000 people globally and, needless to say, the most numerous employees at eBay are those in Customer Support.
eBay is no stranger to an employee cull every now and again. Indeed some insiders will comment that eBay makes a merit of continual reorganisations. In 2008, eBay/PayPal let 1600 members of staff go.
On the run up to the divorce Devin Wenig, head of Markeplaces, and set to become independent eBay’s CEO, has said: “There will be changes; there will be significant changes.”
We’ll see what that means in due course, I suppose.
9 Responses
Could be good news for sellers indirectly, if the “significant changes” make the system simpler and fairer.
Going by the discussion boards a significant number of sellers spend a significant amount of time on the phone to Customer Support at the moment.
Indeed two sellers with identical selling records could end up very different assessments, if one of them has the knowledge and persistence to successfully appeal against non positive feedback, and defects.
Not good news for the employees affected though, of course.
So eBay are going to shed some “dead wood”? Presumably the cull will include many of the useless CS idiots in Dublin and Phillipines who are basically unable to provide any level of “service”. IMO its no bad thing. With any luck the cull with include senior management who are equally as unresponsive and incompetant.
The only issue is this will probably mean even longer waiting times so don’t be suprised if they soon introduce an 0845 number for CS!
Long live the Revolution!! 🙂
we have gave up on ebay customer support we take any defect or problem we cant solve ourselves on the chin
because its just not worth the frustration and time to contact ebay
its insulting to hear the message welcome to ebay top customer support and then be treated like a fool
Divorcing Paypal and Ebay may be no bad thing.
We had our items decimated before Xmas with 000s of them being ended because of unspecified Ebay errors.
Wasted hours on the phone to various Ebay reps.
Eventually found out the problem was with Paypal,
They had decided we had not refunded a customer who had not received their item due to those beeps at Royal Mail.
Paypal then got Ebay to restrict our accounts by ending items early. But nobody at Paypal or Ebay bothered to tell us,
The amount in dispute was princely £2.75, which had been refunded immediately in any case.
It cost us approx six grand in lost sales at Xmas.
So to anyone losing their jobs at Paypal and Ebay, why don’t YOU try selling on Ebay for a living?