Having launched eBay Payments in the US four months ago, eBay say that their confidence and their customers confidence is growing every week. In their Q4 Investor Earnings Call, eBay gave an eBay Payments Progress report saying that since they launched in late Q3 they have enabled over $140 million of GMV with over 3,500 sellers active in the program.
In the holiday period, eBay ramped back on seller recruitment adding around an additional 1,000 sellers, so eBay Payments progress slowed. This is a natural move as many sellers would be naturally reluctant to change anything that could interrupt their operations over Christmas, but despite the slowed recruitment the eBay Payments still added around 40% more sellers in the fourth quarter.
Looking at revenues, $140 million is peanuts in eBay terms when compared with their Q4 marketplace GMV of $23.2 billion. It’s not even 1% of their revenue and so in many ways almost irrelevant, but what makes it critically important, both for eBay and sellers, is their intention to to begin a full roll out in 2020 with a significant percentage of eBay GMV expected to be intermediated by eBay Payments around Q2 2020.
While it’s not possible to measure PayPal vs PayPal via eBay Payments as PayPal is not yet supported, eBay say that historical credit card purchasers on eBay and ApplePay users on eBay and both are showing higher conversion in the new payment experience.
eBay are aiming for eBay Payments progress will build to a $2 billion revenue opportunity at scale. An interesting tidbit is that out of the $140 million GMV intermediated by eBay Payments that they calculate, on average vs PayPal published rates, savings to sellers of $1.2 million in payment related costs.
eBay Payments Progress towards a second territory
Perhaps the most interesting news is that eBay are readying a launch in a second market with an announcement expected during the next quarter.
With the nascent eBay Payments not yet supporting cross border payments, this is a big jump – rather than just ramping up the roll up in the US they are going to be forced to accept multiple currencies and hopefully this signals cross border payments will be rolled out – a big sticking points for many sellers considering joining early.
So which country will be next? A natural partner would be eBay Canada as many buyers already shop on eBay.com and sellers in the two countries routinely sell to each other.
Germany is a possibility as Germans are not quite the fans of PayPal that Brits are. Germans love paying by direct debit and paying via card could be interesting – Germany would be an even more attractive market as eBay Payments progress outside the US if Adyen and eBay enable direct bank transfers.
If you were eBay, which country would you target next?
6 Responses
has to be germany
wont be the UK, come march the 29th were in the twilight zone
Wonder how ebay will protect buyers paying by bank transfers? They don’t offer the same protection as say paypal. Not forgetting that ebay always warn about cash sales etc for this very reason.
My only concerns on the new system are these.
1, Will my paypal rate be the same as my current business rate? If not then not only will i lose out there, but the smaller amount going through my own paypal account will mean my non ebay sales lose out too.
2, I really don’t want money dumped in my bank on a daily basis. We do it weekly as it keeps things nice and simple, especially with refunds etc going straight from paypal rather tna via paypal through my back!
3, Chargebacks etc? Who will be in control of these? Can we really expect ebay to both with fighting our corner on these?
Sadly i see no info on this anywhere… so until i know, im going to sit on the fence on this one. Personally, right now i hope it is along time coming!
I wonder if it is dependent on their contract with PayPal to who they are allowed to test managed payments with? After reading this Germany would make the most sense. Although maybe they want to test it in a smaller market where people are using PayPal so they can measure the effect on a smaller scale. As far as I can tell they are allowed to launch it in any country after Q4?
Yes a very good point made above- buyer fraud is already very easy to get away with on eBay- how will ebay fight charge backs on behalf of the seller? We’ve had absolute proof previously of buyer fraud yet eBay simply don’t want to know, refunds forced on empty box with 500 gram return weight when the initial outgoing box was 3kg etc etc. All easily provable yet never acted upon. Another shrug of the shoulders eBay?
The problem with ebay is there logic behind there thinking is, if you don’t like it then go somewhere else. They think us sellers are there for ebay alone and nobody else. They used to be our biggest platform as we have Amazon and our own website. Now ebay is the last which has slowly declined over the last 12-18 months. If it carries on the same we will be packing ebay in within another 12-18 months. The biggest problem we find is the amount of Chinese sellers which is putting ebay users off. Every time they do a search for an item all the sellers on the first page are Chinese. The rest of the problems just add to the nail in the coffin. I bet Amazon are sat there rubbing their hands and watching whilst ebay inflicts more self destruction on itself.