advertisement
advertisement

eBay Shakes Up Alternative Payments, Amazon Sidelined

Written by Evan Schuman
October 9th, 2008

When eBay on Monday (Oct. 6) announced that it was buying alternative payment vendor Bill Me Later for $820 million in cash and about $125 million worth of outstanding options, the alternative payment landscape got a lot more complicated.

Before that deal, the alternative payment landscape was dominated by companies fully or partially controlled by three of the largest—and oldest—E-Commerce sites: eBay had PayPal; Google had Google Checkout; and Amazon had, in effect, two horses in the race. Amazon had its own entry called Amazon Payments—which was introduced this summer—in addition to a minority investment in Bill Me Later.

With eBay moving in to buy out all of Bill Me Later, Amazon will get cash for its share but little more than that. Mark Lavelle, Bill Me Later’s VP for corporate development, was careful to avoid answering specific questions about Amazon’s part in the eBay drama (had it declined to buy out Bill Me Later? How much of the company did they end up owning?), other than to say, "I don’t think this is a surprise to them at all" and to imply that Amazon’s share wasn’t that large by saying that it had no seat on Bill Me Later’s board of directors.

Given how long such financial negotiations take, it’s likely that Amazon’s July 29 introduction of Amazon Payment happened after the investment decision had already been made. Had Amazon decided to go it alone and lost interest in Bill Me Later, or was the rollout a competitive response to what the company anticipated eBay would do with it?

One not-so-ironic note is that of the handful of major E-tailers that had agreed to accept Bill Me Later—including Apple, OfficeMax, Foot Locker, OfficeMax, Dicks Sporting Goods and Walmart.com—the most prestigious was Amazon itself, which promised to accept Bill Me Later for payment late last year and finally delivered on July 9.

Will eBay’s move prompt Amazon to reconsider accepting Bill Me Later? One prominent industry analyst—who was quoted in PayPal’s own news release as saying that "this deal makes perfect sense" and that PayPal and Bill Me Later "can extend the presence of the two brands and offer even more choice for consumers when they shop online"—said that such a change of heart is inevitable.

The Amazon and Bill Me Later "relationship is dying if not dead already," said Bruce Cundiff, director of payments research and consulting for Javelin Strategy and Research.

Amazon, eBay and Google, though, have more to worry about than industry politics and fighting against each other (although that’s where so much of the fun is).

On the one hand, the acceptance of alternative payments among the largest E-tailers has soared in recent years, going from about 9 percent in October 2006 to 24 percent in February 2007 to about 30 percent in December 2007, according to research done by Brulant.

Although those numbers are impressive—and it’s quite likely that today’s figures are still higher—there are still a healthy number of major retailers that have not embraced any alternative payments. For market expansion, that must change.

The Bill Me Later and PayPal/eBay deals have substantial consumer numbers behind, with Lavelle saying that Bill Me Later alone has about 4 million consumer accounts delivering about $1 billion dollars in annual revenue. PayPal boasts 157 million consumer accounts in 190 countries, although that number plummets to 63 million consumers when it’s limited to accounts that have shown any activity for the prior 12 months.

But the retail resistance is not because of an insufficient number of consumers nearly as much as it is about the complexity of making any kind of material payment change.

Among the largest alternative-payment hesitant retailers are Best Buy, Sears and Dell, Lavelle said, and they are delaying because of a combination of IT complexity and the priority—or lack of same—that they give to online operations. With dollars especially tight these days, projects get prioritized based on pure spreadsheet return-on-investment calculations.

"We need to focus on the ROI of the service, to make it relevant enough to knock everything else out," Lavelle said.

The issue of in-store versus online priorities assumes that alternative payments are a purely Web offering, which is no longer necessarily the case. Various retailers—including Borders—have been considering accepting alternative payments at in-store POS locations, especially with younger consumers that might find PayPal a more compelling choice than Visa.

As is the case with almost all mergers, eBay has been stressing the advantage of the acquisition to strengthen both sides, with the ever-present promise that Bill Me Later’s team will now have access to the much deeper pockets of eBay. That speech is usually given about two days before the E-mail pink slips start landing.

But if Bill Me Later is serious about trying to tackle alternative payments in-store—as Lavelle said—it’s going to need a lot of resources. Then it will be a question of eBay and what it’s spreadsheet-loving ROI-obsessed managers think should be their own priorities.


advertisement

Comments are closed.

Newsletters

StorefrontBacktalk delivers the latest retail technology news & analysis. Join more than 60,000 retail IT leaders who subscribe to our free weekly email. Sign up today!
advertisement

Most Recent Comments

Why Did Gonzales Hackers Like European Cards So Much Better?

I am still unclear about the core point here-- why higher value of European cards. Supply and demand, yes, makes sense. But the fact that the cards were chip and pin (EMV) should make them less valuable because that demonstrably reduces the ability to use them fraudulently. Did the author mean that the chip and pin cards could be used in a country where EMV is not implemented--the US--and this mis-match make it easier to us them since the issuing banks may not have as robust anti-fraud controls as non-EMV banks because they assumed EMV would do the fraud prevention for them Read more...
Two possible reasons that I can think of and have seen in the past - 1) Cards issued by European banks when used online cross border don't usually support AVS checks. So, when a European card is used with a billing address that's in the US, an ecom merchant wouldn't necessarily know that the shipping zip code doesn't match the billing code. 2) Also, in offline chip countries the card determines whether or not a transaction is approved, not the issuer. In my experience, European issuers haven't developed the same checks on authorization requests as US issuers. So, these cards might be more valuable because they are more likely to get approved. Read more...
A smart card slot in terminals doesn't mean there is a reader or that the reader is activated. Then, activated reader or not, the U.S. processors don't have apps certified or ready to load into those terminals to accept and process smart card transactions just yet. Don't get your card(t) before the terminal (horse). Read more...
The marketplace does speak. More fraud capacity translates to higher value for the stolen data. Because nearly 100% of all US transactions are authorized online in real time, we have less fraud regardless of whether the card is Magstripe only or chip and PIn. Hence, $10 prices for US cards vs $25 for the European counterparts. Read more...
@David True. The European cards have both an EMV chip AND a mag stripe. Europeans may generally use the chip for their transactions, but the insecure stripe remains vulnerable to skimming, whether it be from a false front on an ATM or a dishonest waiter with a handheld skimmer. If their stripe is skimmed, the track data can still be cloned and used fraudulently in the United States. If European banks only detect fraud from 9-5 GMT, that might explain why American criminals prefer them over American bank issued cards, who have fraud detection in place 24x7. Read more...

StorefrontBacktalk
Our apologies. Due to legal and security copyright issues, we can't facilitate the printing of Premium Content. If you absolutely need a hard copy, please contact customer service.