During the first quarter earnings call eBay CEO Devin Wenig revealed more details on the roll out of the new Adyen powered payments platform that will be coming to eBay in the next few years. He said that the company had already take “definitive steps” to deliver the intermediated payments system. Of particular note was information that testing will begin shortly and the first guinea pigs will be eBay staff.
The full transcript of the earnings call with analysts can be found here.
We made excellent progress in Q1 on our product build and go-to-market plans while also finalizing the commercial agreement with PayPal to be a form of payment, among others, in our new intermediated payments experience.
We’ll launch an employee beta this summer and then incorporate our learnings into an initial market test where we’ll further learn and iterate. We expect to start small and grow our penetration, building towards intermediating up to 5% of GMV in North America this year. We’ve received very positive market feedback from sellers who see the potential advantage of more efficient payment process, better economics and increased buyer demand.
– Devin Wenig
The good news is that, for this year at least, there will be no disruption to payments outside the USA. The introduction of the new Adyen system will likely prove to be disruptive in some way to merchants (it’s just inevitable with a big change like this). As it stands European eBay sellers don’t need to do anything right now. But it seems likely that next year we will see a more broad selection of tests.
But are eBay staff best placed to judge how good the system is as both buyers and sellers? We’d hope that eBay staff member is an avid buyer on the marketplace but we doubt that very many of them are active merchants. And even fewer are likely to sell in any particular volume.
You can find previous articles about the new eBay and Adyen arrangements for marketplace payments here.
6 Responses
Anyone seeing the TSB banking fiasco will shudder at this changeover.
Zero confidence this will go smoothly.
Here are some daily excerpts from our Ebay system error log:
Internal error to the application
System temporarily unavailable, please try listing again.
This item can’t be accessed because the listing has been deleted, is a Half.com listing, or you aren’t the seller.
What chance have sellers got?
Speaking from the viewpoint of a buyer, I do 95% of my shopping online and ebay is definately just one of many places on the internet I visit to shop. Nearly all online sites use either Paypal or debit card. Why should I go to all the trouble of setting up a different payment system just to shop on one platform. Its just another thing with a username and password to manage and remember. Arn’t I more likely to just shop elswhere until it becomes more popular?
Ayden, never heard of it!
“But are eBay staff best placed to judge how good the system is as both buyers and sellers? ”
on the other had how can ebay staff comment , correct. provide support, if they have no experience of the system ?
It sounds like Adyen accepts Paypal payments as well but maybe you do not get redirected to the Paypal website if a customer is paying with Paypal?
There are a lot of eBay staff yet I doubt they would get a real sense of how its going to perform until it is tested on a total country/market. You would think people who work at eBay are more tech savvy and wouldn’t be thrown by a change like say someone over 50 who wasn’t raised on tech.
A sobering thought,,,,, how many online purchases fail at checkout? When eBay introduce the Adyen deal, any further layers of “intermediating” and requirements to sign up for the new payments process will inevitably cost sales. How many buyers will shrug their shoulders and walk away?