Big Layoffs Begin at eBay and PayPal

February 2, 2015, 2:03 PM PST

• 

Share:

The big job cuts eBay promised last month are here.
On Monday, eBay and PayPal began notifying employees who were losing their jobs as part of the cuts, multiple sources tell Re/code, as management looks to scale back initiatives that haven’t panned out ahead of the planned split of the two companies in the second half of this year.
Some of the PayPal employees who lost their jobs held sales and product roles in the division that focuses on getting restaurants and small business retail stores to accept PayPal as a payment method, one source said. PayPal’s in-store initiatives, which include mobile payments and a credit card reader called PayPal Here, have largely been viewed as big disappointments inside the company, multiple sources say. Another example: PayPal’s in-store beacon product, which was announced in September of 2013, still hasn’t launched widely.
While the PayPal cuts weren’t isolated to these teams, the
severity of them suggest that PayPal may be looking to refocus on its core Web and in-app payments under CEO-designee Dan Schulman. PayPal’s Braintree unit, which houses the red-hot Venmo peer-to-peer payments app, is not affected by the cuts, a source says.
It’s not yet clear which divisions were hit the hardest with layoffs inside the eBay Marketplaces or eBay Enterprise divisions. (If you were affected by the cuts at PayPal or eBay, I’d love to talk with you, on the record or off. You can email me at jason@recode.net.)
An eBay spokeswoman referred me to the comments the company made about the planned layoffs in January.
The cuts come a few weeks after eBay announced it would cut 2,400 jobs across the entire company by the end of the quarter. EBay CEO John Donahoe told Re/code at the time that the number of layoffs, and which roles they affected, were decided by the heads of eBay’s three businesses: eBay Marketplaces, eBay Enterprise and PayPal.
Update: The story was updated to note that PayPal’s beacon product has shipped to some businesses as part of a pilot test, but is still not available widely.