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EBay to Spin Off PayPal

dealbook.nytimes.com

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Re: EBay to Spin Off PayPal

#91

Post by jfoster »

nmj wrote: post #65
jfoster wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think it would be much cheaper? I think it might have to be more expensive. The anonymity aspects of bitcoin could result in more fraudsters getting away with fraud.

The anonymity aspects of bitcoin could result in more fraudsters getting away with fraud. Ignorance creates comments like this. Bitcoin transactions are not reversible, you have zero opportunity for fraud as a buyer.

Read above. We are discussing a hypothetical system that provides a PayPal-like guarantees layer on top of bitcoin. As you point out, bitcoin transactions are always irreversible. That's what could make it more expensive in my view. The service would always be reimbursing buyers involved in failed transactions at its own expense.

Re: EBay to Spin Off PayPal

#92

Post by matthewarkin »

jcampbell1 wrote: post #68
btown wrote: post #41

Is anyone else worried about the long term stability of Braintree under such an aggressive board environment? I was always concerned about conflicts of interest with PayPal acquiring Braintree - two competing and incompatible ways to pay with a credit card. As much as I admire Braintree engineering, and I would normally trust a board to believe in the Braintree brand of reliability, it does no good if a single unpred…

I see the opposite problem on the horizon. With the Braintree acquisition, Paypal is a lot less likely to integrate with Stripe. Braintree is going to be a worse version of Stripe, but we will use it because it will give us PayPal out of the box. It is a good time to work at Braintree.

As someone who has worked a ton with the Stripe API, whenever I use Braintree's (vZero) API it looks soo much like they are trying to copy Stripe, but fail so so hard. Want to get the subscriptions for a customer? Sure, first get all the cards the customer has, then iterate through that list of cards and combine all the subscriptions for each card. Oh, is that a paypal customer, well credit cards and paypal accounts are separate and each can contain subscriptions.

Re: EBay to Spin Off PayPal

#94

Post by WoodenChair »

mathattack wrote: post #89
CrazyCatDog wrote: post #45

When the going gets tough, firms call in consultants. When Bain or McKinsey arrive, they tell you to make a change. Is your firm centralized? Decentralize it! Is your firm decentralized? Centralize it. Donahoe's "master fix" and subsequent exit should give pause to industry thinking of hiring consultants to run their companies in the long-run; for as the saying goes: the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

Wasn't the prior CEO (Meg Whitman) also Bain? In his defense, he was there for almost 10 years, no?

Yes the GP comment is totally off base as far as its attacking Donahoe is concerned (if that was even the intention). He's a very long time eBay exec, and Meg Whitman was nearly with eBay from the beginning. From all outward appearances Donahoe and his colleagues only made this decision after a lot of careful consideration.

Re: EBay to Spin Off PayPal

#95

Post by Chronic29 »

mathattack wrote: post #90
ChuckMcM wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hilarious and on point, but to their credit consultants look at what you are currently doing which isn't working, and suggest you do the other thing on the theory that worst case that won't work either but at least you will have tried something new. I generally think that it is a symptom that the management isn't able to manage the business. Not everyone has the skill set to mix a tech and commerce company into a liv…

The "higher brand" consultancies also live by their stamp of approval. A CEO who wants to do a risky strategy will hire the biggest brand name possible to provide cover. "Nobody got fired for hiring McKinsey for advice" is similar to "Nobody got fired for buying IBM hardware". And in this case, the CEO can say, "Well, I hired the best to help me think it up" when it goes wrong.

Yep. If you're going to do layoffs at your startup or corporation, call a consultant, get their analysis (which is actually unnecessary), fire people, and bam, point the finger at the consultants if any backlash comes your way

Re: EBay to Spin Off PayPal

#96

Post by dkarapetyan »

SEJeff wrote: post #93
dkarapetyan wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chase.

Really? Where? I've been a chase customer since they bought BankOne in ~2006 and haven't seen this.

Sign in to the online portal. If you have a credit card with them you can generate virtual ones tied to that same card.

Re: EBay to Spin Off PayPal

#97

Post by bhangi »

The one question no one seems to be asking is how much of PayPal's revenue is due to transactions on eBay. I suspect that it is the majority. If that's the case, then with the spinoff, it would be in eBay's interest to make all other types of payments equally attractive on its site -- not so good for PayPal, I'd think.

Re: EBay to Spin Off PayPal

#98

Post by rebelidealist »

rebelidealist wrote: post #72
adventured wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alibaba spun off Alipay. How does the Alibaba IPO demonstrate spinning off PayPal is a stupid idea exactly?

Alibaba spun off Alipay because Jack Ma wanted to control Alipay instead of the Alibaba majority stakeholder such as Yahoo and Softbank. It was an uncontested power move by Ma.

Sorry, I don't know why my comment was posted 3 times...

Re: EBay to Spin Off PayPal

#99

Post by slykat »

bhangi wrote: post #97

The one question no one seems to be asking is how much of PayPal's revenue is due to transactions on eBay. I suspect that it is the majority. If that's the case, then with the spinoff, it would be in eBay's interest to make all other types of payments equally attractive on its site -- not so good for PayPal, I'd think.

Last year Ebay's marketplace accounted for 30% of Paypal's revenue. Ebay mentioned that this number is declining and is forecast to hit 15% in the future. So significant but declining.

"That’s no surprise since about 30 percent of PayPal’s business is still on eBay, although that is down from 50 percent only a few years ago. Donahoe said eBay projected it would get to 15 percent quickly." http://recode.net/2014/09/30/ebay-to-spin-off-paypal-with-ne...

Re: EBay to Spin Off PayPal

#100

Post by ghobs91 »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #81
ghobs91 wrote: post #80

I think one of the major sources of eBay's troubles is their decision to slowly abandon their P2P focus, in favor of the "shopping mall of the internet" model that Amazon uses. Rather than pursuing this model and doing it better than the competition, they chose to ape them, and badly. Like CrazyCatDog said, eBay is the textbook example of what happens when a tech company is run by consultants who don't understand the…

A contrarian view: there is some room to attack Amazon, primarily in the UX department. I wouldn't rule that out as a strategy for growth, but is eBay the right company to execute it? That's where it gets murky. They have a lot of the same usability flaws.

Not only in the UX department, but also in their flawed and not very useful personalization system. "We noticed you bought an iPad, here are some more iPads" is not helpful.
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