E-commerce giant, eBay Inc, has revealed a tentative plan to include crypto payments among its range of payment options for customers.
The world’s 66th most valuable company made this announcement in a CNBC interview with the company’s CEO, Jamie Iannone, who stated that the company has started ‘considering’ the option given the growing demand for seamless crypto commerce across the globe.
With over 180 million customers currently utilizing the platform, eBay is looking to join its former subsidiary PayPal, to capitalize on a growing customer base and innovate around NFTs and crypto.
Last year, the San Jose-based company raked in a fortune from soaring sales, helping over 80% of all small businesses based in economically disadvantaged counties in the US, become international exporters. The giant strides culminated into an additional $3bn gross gain for the e-commerce giant according to its 2021 first-quarter reports.
Despite making a profit, eBay constantly kept its eye on the equally profitable parallel world of crypto which crossed the trillion market capitalization mark in 2020 and minted new Forbes Billionaires and is racing to compete favorably with gold’s $10 trillion markets in the nearest future.
Many digital payment companies like Visa, Venmo, and PayPal are already allowing top-tier cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, and stablecoins like USDT for payments on their platforms and it is only plausible that eBay pioneers the class-A e-commerce industry by accepting crypto payments.
With the inclusion of crypto, eBay is looking to ramp up its >$30B market capitalization and gain profitable access to a buzzing, vibrant trillion-dollar market.
Customers in the coming months will be looking to know what type of coins eBay will be accepting and how it plans to handle discounts, shipping fees, and other extraneous costs.
It still remains unclear, also, how much crypto reserves eBay will purchase as a reserve or the mechanics and technology it will put in place to handle the issue of refunds and ‘crypto-back guarantee’.
However, eBay’s entry into the crypto space represents a fresh dose of validation for all digital currencies and all spectators will have their eyes keen on the way eBay would eventually innovate around NFTs. Would it become another retailer, an exchange platform, or something unheard of within the space? It’s all up to eBay to resolve.
