Philipp Justus, PayPal’s senior vice president of global markets, has followed up Eddie Davis’s post on Monday regarding selling globally, with announcements of wide ranging expansions to the number of localised PayPal sites.

The latest post in the PayPal official blog states that PayPal have opened new sites in another 18 countries, and improved locally relevant information globally for another 173 countries.  That’s a massive content edit and creation task and the team are to be applauded for doing it, though one does wonder if it was the root cause of so many glitches in the system this last month?  Most notably the global echeques problems late last month and early this month, as well as the currently emerging one of sellers paying eBay fees that are then marked unclaimed.

Looking beyond the obvious of major PayPal site upgrades leading to temporary glitches, this week’s announcements may be indicative of some of where eBay sellers’ woes have been coming from this year.  The fact that PayPal is now the main cash-cow in eBay Inc’s paddock, and that it is obviously rolling significant territorial expansions could explain why John Donahoe’s Disruptive Innovation has seen the eBay marketplace subjected to persistent breakages of community spirit and shedding of members since the start of the year.

Many people have posted online that JD is doing Amazon’s job for them in terms of the big river’s membership growth, yet only isolated voices in the wilderness have called out that Amazon has a very restricted number of countries from which sellers can enrol.  Not surprisingly, those countries are also eBay’s leading marketplaces and competition between the two venues is fierce within them.  Sitting here, in a far-flung corner of the planet, I’ve watched and noted how eBay Global has upped the tempo in countries where Amazon do not recruit 3rd-party vendors, whilst apparently doing all it can to piss off sellers in core territories.  (Sorry about the “p” word but it’s absolutely the best description for what has happened this year).

As eBay entrenches into completing all it’s policy and operational changes, with at least a further year of such disruption to come, the ground laying for massive expansion in non-Amazon territories appears to be getting laid out.  PayPal’s site expansions and localisation of information available, is just one such vital preparation.

Philipp Justus’s announcement makes it very clear that just three of the new site-countries (Mexico, Hong Kong, and Singapore) gives the company access to 120 million residents of those countries.  That’s double the number of UK residents, eight times the number of Australians, and nine time the number of Canadians, not to mention a significant percentage of the number of Americans.  AND, it must be remembered those three countries are amongst the LEAST populous of the new territories.  Other new territories such as India, the Philippines, and Taiwan yield a far greater potential customer base (just how long have I been saying that in the BuildaSkill blog?) and with nine new languages added to the PayPal sites this month, access to the service is set to surge in a way that will leave the competition flat-footed.

All this begs the questions – Has eBay seen the death of community driven e-commerce leadership (for eBay) in the developed western countries, and are they preparing to abandon them for the new territories?  Or, if not abandon them, simply move them over into “maintenance mode” in order to drive growth from territories Amazon have refused to enter?

Ed