Pay Pal

PayPal still exists. You can use it to pay for all of your eBay purchases as you always have. 

There’s a lot of mis-information out there - combined with suspicion and indignant peal clutching - about an eBay feature called Managed Payments. 

There’s nothing to worry about. The sky is not falling. 

When I sell on ebay now the net funds go directly to my bank account. When I buy something, I still use PayPal, but it's linked to my credit card. Same thing if I send money to friends and family. My PayPal balance is always zero. I'm not sure how they make any money these days, since ebay has taken over their add-on for purchases.

Posted by: @john-sharisky

PayPal still exists. You can use it to pay for all of your eBay purchases as you always have. 

There’s a lot of mis-information out there - combined with suspicion and indignant peal clutching - about an eBay feature called Managed Payments. 

There’s nothing to worry about. The sky is not falling. 

Okay thank you guys.  My problem seems to have been that I assumed Pay Pal was "owned and operated" by Ebay.  So it is a stand alone operation that I can attach my bank accounts/credit cards, etc. to and carry on as before.

For anyone interested, the relationship between eBay and PayPal has been a strange one.

Years ago eBay was trying to encourage people use its own payment system, which apparently wasn't very user-friendly. So sellers preferred to offer PayPal - and eBay didn't like that because of course PayPal was raking in the transaction fees. They tried to force people to make PayPal the last of their payment options. At one point they imposed a limit on the size of the PayPal logo on sellers' sites, making it so tiny as to be almost invisible to buyers. And I think they found various ways to suggest to buyers and sellers that using PayPal might cause problems. PayPal took them to court for trying to bar a legitimate payment facility, and won heavy damages. But eBay persisted in trying to find other ways to discourage the use of PayPal, until one day, when the two outfits were on the verge of another expensive legal battle, eBay suddenly announced it was going to solve the problem by buying PayPal!

And that's the way it has been for some years. I haven't read just why they recently decided to go their separate ways again, but contrary to some rumours, PayPal remains an option for eBay buyers and operates in exactly the same way as it has done for years - eBay's "Managed Payments" system only seems to affect the way they transfer money to and from sellers through their bank accounts rather than via PayPal.

p.s.  I was literally just typing this post when a new e-mail popped up.

Are they reading my mind, or what? But I don't think it changes anything. I hope.