Ebay would be a fool to get rid of Pay Pal. Crazy ideal at that. The sheer amount of money it makes off of Pay Pal and Internet market coverage makes Ebay a power house. They cut loose Pay Pal they cut their throat. Bad idea.

It would be great to see PayPal auctioned off to the highest bidder.

Of late, PayPal has been nothing but a series of alleged ' glitches' which delays the payment flow from buyer to seller while the company profits from the revenue held.

PayPal is unregulated, so all they need do is update their user agreement, and they can make any policy they see fit which benefits them and then force it down customers throats. Takeover by a major bank would serve to bring PayPal under Federal regulation thus preventing current customer abuse.

Members that leave balances in their PayPal accounts do not have their accounts protected individually under FDIC should the ineptness in eBay's boardroom cause the company to fail. Takeover of PayPal by a bank would better protect member account balances.

SAhort of being sold to the highest bidder, it is time for the Federal Government to investigate PayPal's business practices.

Delay of payments caused by 'glitches' are inexcuseable. PayPal's payment hold policy is excessive and abusive of their customers. The forcing of PayPal as the only acceptable form of payment to the exclusion of Checks and Money Orders should be investigated as well.

PayPal does a few things well, and outside of eBay they have a decent reputation. But once you are forced to use PayPal inside or in conjunction with eBay, suddenly the system fails to function properly.

The FIRST thing ebay needs to divest itself of is it's CEO, John Donahoe.

Search the internet for:

"Ebay Stockholders and Sellers Calling For Immediate Termination of John Donohoe CEO"

at petitiononline, to see what is REALLY happening at ebay and to it's users & shareholders!

Read up on the facts from ebay's own employees at glassdoor dot com

Learn about the abuses ebay has inflicted upon it's own users on ebay's discussions pages, such as "Seller Central"!

Search "My Blog Utopia!: Looking for more Dolphin Stories!" to report your own ebay experiences.

Donahoe's & Whitman's "Disruptive Innovation" plot against ebay, it's users and it's shareholders has destroyed the site and it's stocks.

Read more about Whitman at firemeg dot com.

Is a 12 year-old writing these articles? How short sighted is this person? Let's sell every division of the company then we'll have a big pile of cash and no growth opportunity!!!!! ????

Why on earth would ebay sell the jewel in its crown when it could spin it off and create huge value in an IPO and still own the company. Everybody would want in. The internet is really only 10 yrs old. Where will paypal be 50 years from now?

PayPal is a cash cow for ebay. If eBay gets rid of PayPal, everyone should get ready to pay through the nose, and I can expect the top seller to be Google which will only shut it down. Fact, these posts are a total farce, and the only way that PayPal will be forced from eBay's hands is if eBay is in Chapter 7, which could happen if the current leadership continues driving its main customers, the sellers, away from the site.

"PayPal is a cash cow for ebay." It's actually the other way around - PayPal is growing because eBay routes virtually all of it transactions to them. Today, PayPal gets all those transactions for 'free', meaning that eBay doesn't charge them since they're both part of eBay, Inc.

Once PP is divested from eBay, you can be sure that eBay will want a significant chunk of the 2.9% fee that PP charges per transaction. Every big PP Merchant does this same thing, as does every big Google Checkout merchant. They'd be stupid not to - PP needs their business.

So since almost all (90%+) of PP's profitability today comes from eBay, PP is going nowhere...

Bill,

PayPal gets more money from others now according to PayPal itself and this is growing faster than eBay portion.

"PayPal President Scott Thompson said here at the RBC Capital Markets conference Wednesday that by year's end, his company will derive more total payment volumes from its Merchant Services than from eBay buyers and sellers. Merchant Services is the name for the payment software PayPal provides to third-party sites like Starbucks, Delta Airlines, and American Outfitters.(In the last quarter, eBay buyers and sellers---long the bread and butter of PayPal's business--racked up about 51 percent of the payment volumes.)"

This was from last April so even more is off eBay site.

Sheldon -

You're correct, but that's TPV (total payment volume). PP's profitable transactions are almost entirely from the eBay site, where close to 50% of transactions are funded through a bank account.

Almost all of their Merchant transactions are credit card funded. Once PayPal gets done paying the interchange fees, there's almost no profit for them.

This is a known "challenge" within PP, btw. I was, ahem, close to it...

Simply stated: Pay Pal is no friend of mine. They are thieves with a license to steal, lie and manipulate anyone they feel like. I hope and pray I live to see the day when both eBay and Pay Pal cease to exist.

A Canadian court has ruled that tax officials there can collect information on individuals that is stored outside the country, a decision some lawyers say could have implications for companies that do business in Canada but keep records in the United States and elsewhere.

In eBay Canada v. Minister of National Revenue, 2008 FCA 348, a Canadian federal appeal court in Ottawa required eBay Canada to produce confidential information that was not physically kept or stored in Canada, but on computer servers in the United States. The court said that regardless of the physical location, the information was easily accessible in Canada because it could be quickly brought up on computer screens there.

Alexandra Brown, a partner in Toronto's Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt, said the ruling is consistent with recent decisions dealing with the powers of Canada's tax collection agency to obtain documents.

"While I think the decision is quite important within the tax context, I think it may have implications for other areas of law as well," Brown said, such as copyright and intellectual property laws.

The information in the case involves those who reach a certain amount of sales on eBay, the world's largest online marketplace. There are an estimated 10,000 so-called "PowerSellers" in Canada, according to court documents.

Last year, a Canadian court allowed the minister of National Revenue -- the official responsible for tax law and collection in Canada -- to access sellers' contact, sales and other information for tax audit purposes. EBay appealed, arguing that the information was kept outside of Canada. But in the recent ruling, the Federal Court of Appeal dismissed eBay's appeal.

The decision shows that the court looked at the reality of business activities in today's electronic age, rather than focusing on physical location, said Jill Jarvis-Tonus, a partner at Toronto's Bereskin & Parr, an intellectual property law firm.

"It certainly makes clear that you can't structure a business in a way that you can disconnect some of the subsidiaries, and by putting servers outside the country you can't isolate information that affects Canadian business activities," she said. "That may impact businesses."

Companies can no longer count on physical location as the only factor considered when applying laws regarding information access, Jarvis-Tonus said.

"You're going to have to look at where business activity is occurring in cyberspace," she said. "There are a lot of complicated geographical and jurisdictional situations arising from the fact that so much is being done online."

An assistant to Matthew J. Latella, a partner in the Toronto office of Baker & McKenzie who represents eBay, said Latella did not have his client's permission to comment on the case.

EBay has until Jan. 6 to file an application seeking an appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada.