eBay Managed Payments: Full Steam Ahead

With 3 weeks to go before eBay implements its Managed Payments mandate on what appears to be a majority of US sellers, the company published an announcement about its progress – though it still has not published details about its new fees (see today’s EcommerceBytes Blog post).

The eBay announcement follows:

eBay Payments: Where We’re Headed this Summer and Beyond
By: Alyssa Cutright, VP, Global Payments, Billing & Risk

What we’re doing stretches beyond payments; it’s about how eBay is optimizing its marketplace for both buyers and sellers.

Nearly 25 years ago, eBay was born as Pierre Omidyar’s experiment in internet commerce. Today, eBay continues to embody his philosophy of how marketplaces should run – openly and honestly. In the years since our founding, we’ve expanded and innovated as our marketplace has grown worldwide.

Thinking about the next 25 years, we are laser-focused on ensuring our marketplace and the overall eBay experience is as intuitive, streamlined and modern as possible. We will continue to invest in tools and technologies that position our sellers to grow and thrive.

As we’ve highlighted previously, a major initiative for eBay in 2020 centers on simplifying our payments process. Since we announced our intention to manage the end-to-end payments process, we’ve been paced by an agreement with PayPal that governs how quickly we can roll-out the experience. We’re approaching a milestone this July when that agreement expires — and we are poised to take major steps forward to expand managed payments through the rest of 2020 and beyond.

Under our approach, buyers have more ways to pay and a more streamlined checkout experience with the end-to-end transaction and payment managed by eBay. For sellers, that means an end to third-party payment processing fees, since they’ll only have to pay one final value fee for items sold. eBay connects millions of buyers and sellers globally every day, and this frictionless experience will help enable us to more easily facilitate purchases across borders, allowing sellers to focus on running and growing their businesses.

This new payments experience brings speed and simplicity to further support the success of those who do business on eBay by letting sellers manage their business entirely within eBay, while adding an increased end-to-end view of transactions across buyers and sellers, including better visibility into sales and payouts.

So far, we’ve taken a phased approach to our new payments experience of full intermediation globally, announcing just a few key markets – starting in the U.S. and Germany with plans to expand to the U.K., Australia and Canada later this year. We’ve been working to get everything right before we fully implement changes across our global footprint and now we are ready to begin expanding. This phased approach was necessary because every seller is different and there are varying needs in each market, and we want to ensure we are supporting the features sellers use to sell on our platform.

As we continue to expand our management of payments globally, our measures of success will continue to be the feedback we receive from our sellers and will continue to work closely with our seller community to address their desires, concerns, and feedback.

Globally, eBay’s managed payments has processed more than $3 billion of GMV for more than 32,000 sellers as we shared in our first quarter earnings.

For buyers, managed payments brings flexibility and choice in payment methods. Buyers can complete their checkout experience from desktop or mobile devices, and can select from a variety of payment options, including credit cards and PayPal. Apple Pay is available as a payment option on iPhone and iPad. Google Pay is also available on the eBay site as well as on the eBay Android App. We also recently enabled Afterpay as a payment option for buyers in Australia and Paybright as a payment option for buyers in Canada.

We expect the transition to full payments intermediation globally to be complete in 2022. Most sellers will transition into managed payments in 2021 — and we look forward to hearing from buyers and sellers how their experiences improve with eBay.

Specifically, here’s what the new managed payments experience looks like as we expand and enable more sellers over the coming year.

For sellers: Managed payments is frictionless

• A more streamlined, simple experience: The managed payments transformation puts everything from inventory to finances all in one dashboard, including: customized reports and a single source of fees, refunds, simplified protections and payout scheduling options.
• One place to sell and get paid: Payouts are consistently initiated to sellers’ bank accounts within two business days of an order confirmation — no matter how the buyer pays.
• Empowers sellers of all sizes to grow their businesses: New sellers and small businesses can turn their attention to growing their operations, rather than devoting time and money to understanding how they’ll receive payments. Sellers — especially small businesses and entrepreneurs that have fewer resources to navigate complicated payments structures — benefit from greater control over when they’re getting paid. In addition, sellers can easily facilitate cross-border trade through the Global Shipping Program, which covers customs, taxes and import/export fees.
• Sellers save on transaction costs. No fees to third-party payment processors means most sellers see savings.

For buyers: Managed payments offers more ways to pay

• Smooth, seamless transactions: No more headaches with multiple third-party providers and payments processed off eBay. Simply purchase with any payment method offered at checkout on eBay.
• Greater flexibility and choice: With more options for payment providers than ever, buyers can pay how they want, when they want — no problem if that’s on mobile or using local currencies.

Follow our managed payments journey at ebayinc.com/payments.

You can find the announcement on the eBayInc.com corporate blog.

And visit the EcommerceBytes Blog to leave a comment.

Ina Steiner

Ina Steiner is co-founder and Editor of EcommerceBytes and has been reporting on ecommerce since 1999. She's a widely cited authority on marketplace selling and is author of "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars" (McGraw-Hill 2006). Her blog was featured in the book, "Blogging Heroes" (Wiley 2008). She is a member of the Online News Association (Sep 2005 - present) and Investigative Reporters and Editors (Mar 2006 - present). Follow her on Twitter at @ecommercebytes and send news tips to ina@ecommercebytes.com. See disclosure at EcommerceBytes.com/disclosure/.