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Comment by TorKlingberg | Hacker News Reader

I think eBay has a lot of what I would call "process debt". Not technical dept, I don't know what their code looks like. It's all that extra complexity that has built up over the years. eBay has so many menus and settings and listing options that I just get lost.

The most obvious one is PayPal. That may have made sense in the '90s, but today I should just pay money to eBay, they take their cut and send the rest to the seller. Instead I pay directly to the sellers PayPal account, which may be named something completely different from their eBay account. Then eBay sends the seller an invoice at the end of the month or something. All unnecessary complexity, but I'm sure someone would be outraged if they changed anything.

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"I should just pay money to eBay, they take their cut and send the rest to the seller."

That makes eBay the seller, or auctioneer, which gives you consumer law rights against eBay.

Absolutely not. On Amazon when you buy from a 3rd party seller, you always send the money to Amazon, but Amazon is not the seller. It just handles payment.

That’s not how it works with marketplaces. Otherwise Shopify would be on the hook. eBay could process payments but that doesn’t make them the seller.

Shopify uses Stripe to process payments because they don't want to be responsible for it.

Good news on the Paypal front. eBay didn’t renew their deal with PayPal. They’re going with Ayden, the European processing company. Should be integrated into the site.

Looks like eBay unloaded PayPal in 2015. Guess this is how long it takes to unwind that relationship.

What a mess that spin-off showed eBay to be, too - At IPO, Paypal's market cap was nearly 150% of eBay's - Meaning that investors valued all of eBay as a 15+ Billion liability on Paypal itself. Given their complete lack of movement since, that's not a surprise.

eBay is worth $37 billion today. They very clearly were not being valued at a negative market cap.

There are no examples in recent US stock market history of a large, extremely profitable corporation with a positive balance sheet being valued at a negative market cap. There's a reason for that.

The combined unit was suffering a discount. That's precisely why PayPal was separated. If your premise were right, eBay today would be worthless, not trading for $37 billion.

> eBay is worth $37 billion today

> extremely profitable corporation

Yup, layoffs look like a classic pump and dump to fiddle with the numbers for a sale.

300 positions is not going to significantly alter ebay’s profitability. It seems more likely to me that this is an occasion to drop a group of low performers all at once, or to make a certain job family redundant.

We don't know yet whether or not that's good news I think. I've never knowingly used Ayden.

> today I should just pay money to eBay, they take their cut and send the rest to the seller

That is exactly what they've been planning for a while: https://pages.ebay.com/seller-center/service-and-payments/ma...

They are starting it with some sellers this year but are expecting the full roll-out to take several years, with majority of customers transitioned by 2021.

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