A month ago, eBay Australia announced its Safe Payment Initiative, and the story was covered here on Ink – generating a lot of discussion. Earlier today, the Associated Press published a story titled “eBay mulls PayPal only payments”.

Along with my colleagues here and in Australia, we talked with the reporter about this story and said several times that “we have no plans to implement PayPal-only in the US”. This quote didn’t make it into the story, which is too bad because it seemed pretty clear what we meant. But in all fairness, this type of language led to a lot of questioning comments on Ink last month.

The result today was an AP story that made it “unclear whether eBay will institute a similar policy in the United States and other countries.”

While we wish the AP had listened to us and printed the quote, I’ll clarify what we meant here:

In the US, we are not mulling, planning, or otherwise seriously considering a move to PayPal-only. There are US market-specific reasons why PayPal-only is something we simply cannot do in the US.

We were offered the chance by the AP to be categorical on this subject, and we declined to do so. We declined because there are no plans, but categorical statements have a tendency to cause headaches down the road, particularly as we evaluate how to move forward in other markets and as conditions could shift in the US.

As I said in the article, we will take what we learn in Australia with PayPal-only and apply it accordingly. What perhaps didn’t come across as well is that we will apply those lessons differently in different markets.

We are a global company that has been successful, in part, because we allow each market to operate in a way that is both uniquely eBay and uniquely local, and we will continue to do so.

Thanks,
Usher Lieberman
Corporate Communications