It’s hard to believe that a decade has passed since eBay’s purchase of PayPal for $1.5 billion closed in October 2002. At the time, eBay was the dominant e-commerce player on the web, and PayPal was an upstart payment service that had squeezed out eBay’s in-house payment option.
Now, with over 117 million active users worldwide and $35 billion in payment volume per quarter, PayPal is a major part of eBay’s business and the payment option of choice for many merchants around the globe. It’s a fitting time to reflect on the reasons PayPal sold itself to eBay and what the ramifications of that fateful decision have been.
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