eBay President and CEO Devin Wenig has revealed more information about the transition of marketplace payments from PayPal to Adyen over the next two years or so. It was announced two weeks ago that once the post-split operating agreement expires in 2020, PayPal would no longer be the principal payments system on the marketplace. Rather eBay said it would start “intermediating” payments using platform Adyen. We wrote about that here.
Wenig said that once the operating agreement expires, they will name a date in 2020 for the transition. New terms and conditions will come into play and the Adyen system will be the only way to transact on the site.
It’s not going to be optional. We’re not going to hold peoples’ hands and beg them to move over. We’re basically going to say your eBay account is now your full end-to-end eBay account for all your activities including payments. And that’s the way it works on every other marketplace.
– Devin Wenig, president and CEO of eBay
In speaking about the new system Wenig explained several of the advantages that switching from the current PayPal-based system will bring, whilst also noting that PayPal will still be an available payment method. Buyers will enjoy much greater choice including, for example, Apple Pay in the US. And, around the world in the 190 countries eBay operates in, there are many local payments methods shoppers prefer to use.
And there is a financial benefit to eBay too. Wenig has said that he expects it to generate $2bn in incremental revenue for eBay and a predicted $500m in income. That’s one reason why Wall St. has looked so favourably upon the announcement.
It has also been confirmed that there will be initial testing of the new system starting in 2018 with perhaps 5% to 10% of users experiencing the changes. There no indication of when that will be but it does seem that eBay isn’t wasting any time developing and testing the new system despite the fact that the operating agreement doesn’t expire for two years.
Let us know if you spot any of the new process in operation as you use the site over the coming months.
10 Responses
Arrogant SOB
Let’s hope PayPal start their own marketplace, give eBay a strong competitor
This is to make sure it’s impossible to get buyers email now! They want everything to happen on ebay
They’ve failed to grow sales significantly, so taking payments in-house is an easy way to boost income and share price, without any real effort.
It also covers over the fact that the long list of age-old problems facing sellers on Ebay is still not being addressed. Really BASIC things like searches and the checkout still do not work, let alone those mysterious periods of up 12 hours at a time when NOTHING sells, followed by a sudden mini splurge of sales.
The only benefit here seems to be to Ebay. At best, sellers will be no worse off at the start, but it’s hugely unlikely they will resist future payment fee hikes. It’s their equivalent of raising national insurance instead of income tax!
Still, Wenig believes that spraying the Ebay dustbin a bright shiny new colour will help disguise all the rotten rubbish inside it. But what about the smell, Wenig, how you gonna deal with that?
This is just another example of how the marketplaces we sell on will move the goalposts year after year to squeeze as much profit out of everyone as possible. The problem is small retailers don’t have any other option these days but to sell on other platforms and marketplaces – gone are the loyal customer days, now when they are just searching for the cheapest price on-line you cannot get enough ROI to warranty the marketing spend to get to the top of the searches for most products.
We really like everything about Paypal – and get a good rate due to the volume, take away the Ebay sales from that volume and suddenly we are paying 0.5% or more extra for every payment we take with Paypal. So if the cost of Ebay processing the payment is higher than 1.9% and then add the fact that you now pay 2.3% for your other payments with Paypal due to volume – it is an expensive move for a small retailer and one that they didn’t chose.
I may sell on Ebay and Amazon, but I rarely buy on them for this very reason. We must support the independent business and their own website.
I really have no idea whether this change is good or bad for me — no particular love for Paypal or the double jeopardy of claims on platform as well as payments provider, but no idea if the alternative will be better.
In reading this — the fact that eBay will put a gun to my head to do the change — two things strike me:
1. It’s not sufficiently better for me to want to change and
2. Devin hasn’t learnt from last year’s off-eBay car-crash and doesn’t understand how he wins this marketplace battle.
if we make profit we like it, and use ebay, otherwise we dont
its that simple
If that’s a direct quote from Devin, then what a contemptuous little man.