paypal spy for Ebay, Business insider

[feadup]

Bay monitors the PayPal accounts of its biggest sellers to see how much off-eBay business they're doing and thereby reward or punish them on their platform. That's at least the allegation made by Daniel Leffel, the CEO of eBay competitor Yardseller, citing "a senior level eBay person." (eBay owns PayPal.) Leffel also says it uses PayPal to spy on competitors.

eBay's core business is in a bad shape in many ways. Though it's still a cash machine, it's still very inefficient, and many of these inefficiencies privilege big eBay sellers over smaller ones, which is noxious for the platform in general. In many ways, eBay is held hostage by its biggest sellers.

The company is planning to address this with its "New eBay" strategy, which sounds good, but as so often, execution is what will make or break it.

Read more: eBay: Competitor Alleges It Uses PayPal To Spy On Sellers - Business Insider

[james13v]

Update: A PayPal spokesperson writes us:

This is absolutely untrue. PayPal does not share an individual merchant’s specific off-eBay transaction data with eBay. Our corporate policy and procedures require that if any data is shared, it is only aggregate data of sales, but not on an individual account level. Our service is built on privacy, and we respect a merchant’s right to keep their sales data private as well.

Read more: eBay: Competitor Alleges It Uses PayPal To Spy On Sellers - Business Insider

[james13v]

ugh, I just realized this is from 2011......

[TerryPrince]

Their whole model is to just eliminate competition because they have their monopoly in place to make profit more than any other company that has in Online Commerce business....

[agent006140]

There is an article yesterday of third party sellers who sell on both AMZN and Wmt/
AMZN would punish them if they sell the same items cheaper on WMT!

[agent006140]

EBay needs to change very badly,they have hired 2 guys,one from AMZN AWS,cant recall where the other come from,either Google or MSFT.
But what they need most is a marketing guy,I know you guys dont sell antiques and collectibles,but those categories are flooded with mundane mass produced stuff they found in thrift shops.
They will haul these items to Ebay forum and ask questions ,hoping someone would tell them these are rare and fetch good $$.
Good dealers with good merchandise go to boutique auctions , if they list on Ebay,the offers they get are pure insults !