EBay Says It Is ‘Now Playing Offense’
SAN JOSE, Calif.—EBay Inc. is aiming to nearly double the active-user count on its eBay.com marketplace over the next three years, as well as the volume of payments processed by its PayPal unit. — The once-beleaguered e-commerce company also forecast a big jump in revenue by 2015.
Context & Ripple Effects
eBay enters 2013 with PayPal already central to its growth case: PayPal had previously targeted a doubling in scale, and it delivered its first $1 billion quarter in 2011. The company has also identified mobile commerce as a major demand shift, with management reporting a surge in mobile shopping in 2012.
The new multi-year targets put the marketplace's active-user growth and PayPal's payment volume under one operating agenda. That matters because eBay has been building both commerce discovery and mobile-payment capabilities rather than treating them as separate businesses.
First-order effects
- eBay management is accountable for nearly doubling eBay.com active users and PayPal payment volume over three years, alongside its 2015 revenue forecast.
- PayPal becomes an explicit growth engine in eBay's plan, requiring its product and customer-acquisition efforts to support a much larger payments base.
Second-order effects
- Amazon faces a more urgent eBay effort to improve commerce discovery, building on eBay's stated development of a search engine to compete with Amazon.
- Square competes for attention in mobile payments as PayPal scales its mobile-payment push, including the scanner it introduced for that market.
Third-order effects
- If eBay meets these linked targets, marketplace growth and payments adoption become mutually reinforcing measures of an e-commerce platform's reach rather than separate business-unit goals.
- The plan points toward competition in which shopping platforms seek to own both product discovery and the transaction, raising the strategic value of mobile payment tools.
The trend: E-commerce platforms are tying marketplace audience growth more tightly to in-house payments as mobile shopping reshapes how customers discover and complete purchases.