eBay‘s announcement that they would build their own inhouse eBay Payments solution in partnership with Adyen caused a ton of interest around the world from online sellers, industry pundits and investors alike. It makes a lot of sense as eBay are one of the few major marketplaces in the world not to have an integrated payments platform.
Since the split that saw PayPal floated off as a separate company, eBay don’t even have control of which competitor marketplaces PayPal power and will have ever decreasing control of how PayPal operate and power eBay payments. The desire to be able to collect payments from buyers and distribute directly to sellers, either as a balance that can be re-spent on eBay or withdrawn to the merchants bank accounts isn’t just sensible, it’s almost essential to be able to manage the entire sales process on eBay inhouse.
So far however, everyone (whether in favour or against the change) is getting worked up about how eBay Payments will work on eBay. What no one is asking is whether eBay will open up their payments network to enable payments on other platforms.
PayPal was never an eBay Payments platform. PayPal existed before eBay acquired them and was so convenient that many eBay buyers and sellers had already adopted PayPal as their preferred choice for eBay Payments and so could always be used off-eBay. Other marketplaces such as Amazon built their own payments solutions known as Amazon Pay and opened up their finance solution so that retailers could utilise it for their own website enabling consumers to pay using their Amazon log in credentials.
Is there any reason that eBay Payments couldn’t one day power sales on third party websites? Or perhaps the question should be “Why wouldn’t eBay expand eBay Payments beyond eBay?”.
One of the big advantages eBay will have once they have a fully fledge payments solution is that they also hold a retailers inventory. How hard would it be to enable SME retailers to launch a website solution populated with their inventory from eBay with payments powered by eBay Payments? eBay such a solution once, it was called eBay Prostores but was shut down in 2015 along with Magento Go stores, another small business solution.
eBay haven’t currently announced any plans for eBay Payments other than to manage payments on eBay. If they did offer off-eBay payments and perhaps a webshop solution, would you be interested in using them?
2 Responses
only makes sense if Adyen are thick and sign their entire soul over to ebay.
otherwise, reasonable people would pass the middle man with their extra fees, and go straight to being “powered by Adyen” as per ebay.
or maybe we can have “ebay pay, powered by Adyen, forwarded by Argos, underwritten by Gerneral direct, certified by Shopify and Google guaranteed”, with a low, low fee of 27.9% on debit card transactions.
It’s a crowded market place already and Ebay’s reputation for system problems reinforced over 20 years or more will not help them.
Besides, unless they are MUCH cheaper than alternatives (and they won’t be), why would anyone use them?
It’s like Tesco offering banking (and getting hacked last year). If you want potatoes, go to a supermarket. If you want banking, go to a bank.