Managed Payments

How We’re Building a More Seamless Payments Product Experience

Shan Vosseller, VP of Product, Payments

With our customers’ feedback in mind, we’re accelerating the evolution of our managed payments experience worldwide.

Everything we do is in service of our customers. From day one, our global managed payments experience has been grounded in ensuring that the buyers and sellers who transact on our platform experience a simpler, more modern eBay. We know the product decisions we make can have a real impact on a seller’s livelihood, and we strive to create an experience that streamlines their day-to-day tasks, so they can have more time to run and grow their business. 

To date, we have processed over $3 billion in gross merchandise volume (GMV) for more than 32,000 sellers — all within the confines of our Operating Agreement with PayPal which paces our rollout. Still, we continue to listen to and meet with our customers and prioritize each update in accordance with what we’re hearing from our community. We’re scaling quickly and growing globally — and always with a customer-first, continuous improvement mindset. 

Just over two years ago, we kicked off the journey to create more choice for buyers, and build a more seamless seller experience with better seller economics by managing payments on our marketplace platform. We are approaching a significant milestone this July as we begin rapidly scaling the program globally.

With our customer research and feedback in mind, we are building a more modern managed marketplace centered around the evolution of how we process payments for the millions of transactions that occur on eBay every day. 

Our Goal: To Create a Simplified, Easy-to-Use Payments Experience

Driving this evolution is a desire to create a simpler, more unified experience for our customers. We are committed to constructing better buyer and seller experiences with a diversity of payment choices and a more streamlined approach to shopping and selling. 

We are removing friction from the payments process on our platform by pulling together a number of disparate experiences so sellers can manage their business in one place, and buyers can easily find what they want and zip through checkout — paying in their preferred way, all on eBay. Beyond payments, eBay on the whole is focused on its core marketplace, modernizing the experience overall, including reinvestments in the  basics on its platform. As the payments process becomes more integrated, many more experiences are also being improved for our customers.

Throughout all of this, we are re-engineering the payments process while simultaneously keeping millions of transactions running during the transition. Our team is laser-focused on making this transformation as seamless as possible, working to create familiar, improved experiences for our customers that are aligned with retail and payments standards. 

We have already launched a number of new features and capabilities in our reimagined payments program. For buyers, we’ve added new ways to pay, including Google Pay, credit and debit cards, and SEPA direct debit in Germany. We’ve also added Apple Pay as a payment option on iPhone and iPad. For sellers, most can expect to see lower payment processing costs and will benefit from a simplified pricing structure and more predictable access to their funds. In addition, because the needs of our sellers and buyers vary, we launched a number of new features: 

  • Sellers can now get paid directly to their bank with consistent timing and their choice of daily or weekly payouts.

  • Sellers can pay for shipping labels from their pending payouts.

  • Items can now be sold to international buyers directly through cross border trade or through the Global Shipping Program.

  • We've introduced order numbers that persist through the entire lifecycle of an order for both buyers and sellers, making order management, customer support, and financial reconciliation easier.

  • We now leverage sales and payment data to provide more robust business cost and performance reporting.

  • We've made it easier to issue refunds and created a single place for sellers to manage disputes and claims.

Best of all, these enhancements are all found right where our customers use eBay today — there’s no need for new accounts or other sites to navigate. We’re continuing to build our payments platform with our customers top of mind.

A Collaborative, Customer-Centric Team Culture 

As we add new features for managed payments and prepare to roll out to new markets, our team continues to make note of how customers are using our tools, focusing on how we can assuage any pain points or create new capabilities. 

Our teams regularly meet with eBay sellers to get a first-hand account on what’s needed to streamline their daily business operations. We use those ongoing conversations to help inform and guide us in developing a payments experience that’s both flexible and tailored to our customers worldwide. 

Building upon those efforts, we also conduct individual and group user research, participate in online community boards, and launch updates based on qualitative and quantitative user data to inform us on what our customers need and want most. Our employees worldwide are also helping us shape improvements to the product experience by beta testing new features and sharing their feedback with us — especially important as we enter new markets. 

Team collaboration and customer feedback fuel our new payments experience. We’re committed to creating new features and capabilities based on what we’ve learned, observed and heard from our customers. Because payments capabilities are so deeply woven throughout the eBay experience we work closely across the company to ensure that we’re improving eBay overall through our work and delivering an experience that doesn’t expose the boundaries of organizations, components or technology platforms. As we continue developing managed payments, we want to ensure that each update offers value for our millions of buyers and sellers worldwide.  

Looking to the Future 

Our marketplace unlocks a connected global economy and enables cross-border trade opportunities between buyers and sellers. And, as the market continues to evolve, so do we. 

Our teams are focused on innovation and re-imagining how managing payments on our platform can help us create better experiences across the eBay marketplace. Looking to the future, we will continue to transition sellers into the new experience until it’s woven into the fabric of how our customers sell and get paid. 

By managing payments on our platform, we’re able to build better experiences for our customers. We can introduce financing and payment installment solutions that allow buyers to spread out payments and afford the items they really want; and we can provide our sellers with access to working capital that fits their business needs. 

As we continue to expand payments to more of the countries we operate in, we will ensure the most popular and relevant forms of payment are available to buyers, and tailor our payment capabilities to match the unique needs of customers in each market.

We’ll always evolve, innovating on behalf of our customers around the world to reduce friction and propel our modern managed marketplace forward. 

Follow along with our managed payments journey at ebayinc.com/company/managed-payments.