eBay Releases Report on First Week with eBay Payments

It has been just over one week since eBay Payments went live for sellers that opted into the program. We have seen some mixed reaction in Facebook groups, but the company provided its view on the progress of implementing eBay Payments.

Here is eBay’s first report on eBay Payments and it was provided by Alyssa Cutright, VP Payments, eBay, Inc.

We’re a week into our multi-year managed payments journey and we’re very excited. This new experience is live and enabled on a small scale in the U.S. We’ve already learned a lot in these early days, and we are committed to continuing to learn in order to iterate and improve the experience over time.

As we’ve said previously, managing the payments flow will allow us to simplify the end-to-end experience for buyers and sellers. In particular, most sellers can expect reduced costs of payments processing; have a central place to manage their business, and expand their reach by offering buyers more choice in payment options.

Sellers are central to creating this new experience, and we’ve been partnering closely with them to share our vision for the end state of managed payments.

We’re taking extra efforts to listen to sellers’ feedback, concerns and ideas.

Our initial roll-out prioritized innovations and improvements that sellers told us were important – like direct payouts to their bank account, consolidated billing with all fees included in one statement and new ways for buyers to pay that don’t require sellers to do anything to enable them.

We continue to work with our sellers to optimize different aspects of the experience — such as reporting, for example.

Since last week’s introduction, we’ve heard a lot from our seller community. Danna Crawford with PowerSellingMom told us that:

“The process is hands-free. eBay has made the switch over so easy. I didn’t have to adjust any of my payment policies. The direct deposits have started and are running smoothly. I love the fact that I do not have to transfer funds anymore. I can pay my bills directly from my checking account with less hassle of money transfers. Makes my life easier!”

At the same time, we’ve also received a number of questions from our sellers who are part of the initial roll-out. I wanted to share some of their most common questions and our answers:

• Why isn’t PayPal initially available in the new payments experience?
  We know that many buyers on eBay are accustomed to paying with PayPal and that PayPal is important to have long-term. Offering PayPal in a managed model required a new integration for us, and we’re working on it and expect to make PayPal available by summer 2019.

• What are my options if managed payments isn’t right for my business now?
  We are working with sellers one-on-one to understand whether managed payments is a fit for them. If managed payments doesn’t work for a seller, we want to work with them to see if we can help them be successful with the changes, ensure we understand and document what isn’t working, and if needed revert their account to the prior state. That said, the process to revert accounts to their prior payment settings can be complex as orders and listings can be in different states, and this process needs to be managed individually with each seller.

• What are you doing to make buyers aware of alternative payment methods?
  For buyers who purchase from managed payments sellers, the checkout flow notifies them that PayPal is not yet available. And when buyers are on a compatible mobile device, they will see ApplePay as an available option.

• When will you include other capabilities – like enabling managed payments for cross-border trade, making APIs available for integration, expanding managed payments to all categories and simplifying the global shipping process?
  These are all on our roadmap. Keep in mind that we are starting small with select features and capabilities, and we will be incorporating additional functionality, including these, in time.

In our effort to be transparent during this transition, I’ll continue to provide periodic updates here on our progress with these and other steps along the way.

Communication is Good – Actions Are Better

The bottom line here is that communication is good, and it is great to see that eBay appeared to change their mind that sellers who are not satisfied with the new system can revert back to standard system.

At eBay Open, it seemed the news was once you made the switch, you were stuck. We have seen reports on Facebook groups were sellers confirmed they were able to switch back after talking with customer service about their issues with the program.

READ MORE: Sellers Accepting eBay Payments Will Have to Wait Until Summer 2019 for Paypal

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