eBay is holding an annual analyst meeting on Wednesday March 11th. Highlighted at this meeting will be future plans for eBay’s PayPal business.
As Peter Burrows at BusinessWeek notes, John Donahoe has said that he expects PayPal to be bigger than eBay itself. It looks like the company’s making moves to accommodate that, and that includes mobile.
“Like most online companies, PayPal has plans for the mobile market,” reports Burrows. “The company just announced a new hook-up with Research In Motion (RIMM) that makes PayPal an option for buying apps for BlackBerry devices. And for the future, Stephenson says, they are also working on ways to make PayPal available on billions of lower-end phones that lack Net access—even phones owned by people who don’t have credit cards or bank accounts.”
Sidenote: Putting more focus on mobile makes sense. In fact, more businesses should really be doing so. This is a topic discussed in the following exclusive interview with Cindy Krum from Rank-Mobile:
PayPal is apparently also working on a way for developers to create new ways for users to use the service.
It’s no secret that eBay itself has weathered a fair amount of criticism. Perhaps focusing on PayPal a bit more will help the company’s stock. PayPal’s senior Vice-President Jack Stephenson doesn’t think the stock market properly values PayPal, so they’re going to give more visibility on that side of eBay’s business.
Critics will likely have plenty to say, as it is eBay’s highlighting of PayPal that is one of their frustrations. eBay’s move of going to no checks or money orders didn’t go over to well with many of the site’s users.
