Major Paypal Change As Of May 7, 2019: They Are Keeping All Fees On Full And Partial Refunds

As I mentioned above this is a 'divorce'. Divorces are typically ugly, cause hard feelings, and disrupts all the finances. So I would expect a period of hard going for all parties before things iron themselves out on the other side.
Don

Well Don, to be more accurate, it's less of a divorce than ebay the parent disinheriting the PayPal child, since ebay owned PayPal.

Somewhere, someone took a hard left turn to Albuquerque here...

ebay spent all this time developing, creating and instituting PayPal, and now it's getting rid of it?

If ebay OWNS PayPal, what's the point of divesting such a time-consuming and expensive venture, only to start all over again?

What am I missing here?

Internet searching will turn up extensive analysis in 2015 when the split was announced, but a simplified view is that there were few synergies between the two businesses, independence would allow better business opportunities (e.g., ebay could shop around for payment services, and PayPal could pursue new merchant partners that could be viewed as competing with ebay), and shareholders wanted to separate the P&Ls so that costs or losses of one business would not drag down the other (e.g., an investor seeking the returns expected of a financial services business would not see that profit margin shrunk by the costs of a merchant or auction business).

ebay sold Paypal a few years ago.

Okay, the point of separating the two is viable until you realize that after divestment, ebay is just going to reinvent the payment system again.

Yes ebay is in the process of implementing a new payment system and frankly I'm worried about it. For me Paypal works very well, I've had to call them 3 or 4 times in 15 years and always got a satisfactory resolution of the problem. I can't imagine calling ebay about fiscal issues. Once ebay gets control of the $ I can see them using that control to influence our performance. ie. holding payment until item shows delivered in tracking system.

I just hope I can continue to use Paypal.

And it isn't just that Paypal works well within an ebay context. Large numbers of businesses now allow payment via Paypal, and, in those cases, I suspect that many of us prefer to use our Paypal accounts rather than loading debit or credit card details.

As a credit card merchant for nearly 20 years, I'm not surprised that PayPal has made this change, which only levels the playing field for refunds. For the past few years, merchants have had to pay the fees both ways, for sales and for refunds. I avoid PayPal due to their much higher overall fees vs a merchant account, in my case an extra 2-4% depending on card type. If they were to drop their fees to compete with Mastercard and Visa, I'd consider using them. And for foreign transactions, American Express is still the cheapest (I've never had to process an Amex refund so can't confirm if they charge a fee for a refund) Steve Taylor https://www.stephentaylor.co.uk