That seems like a good question to pose about the person who is leading up the “Department” of Government Efficiency (DOGE). After all, it would be reasonable to expect that a government agency committed to increasing efficiency in government would go about its work in an efficient manner. It would be pretty hard to make that case about DOGE.
I was an eBay power seller in the early 2000s, and it was becoming pretty lucrative, enough that i was considering making it my main gig, but PayPal ruined it.
Multiple times i would log in to find my online store suspended for some period of time, once for an entire month. There was no explanation, just a suspension. And they don’t just turn off your store, they delete it entirely, so i would have to rebuild the store from scratch, relisting every item, and i had over 200 items.
Also, eBay did absolutely nothing about customers who would demand, and get, refunds with no proof of a damaged item. If you gave the crook a bad review, they’d do it back. They could always delete their account and start fresh, but my unjustified bad feedback from crooks would accumulate and lower my score and reputation.
Ebay and PayPal are two evil entities that deserve each other, and to this day i wont do any business with any PayPal associated business like Venmo.
The common wisdom in the reseller community about PayPal is to never leave any funds inside the paypal wallet, do not use them for large transactions and do not use them to transmit money that you depend on.
You can read many horror stories online about people who “trust” PayPal and then get blindsided and lose their money with no way to appeal or recover.
There seems to be a pattern where PayPal just steals large account balances and burns those clients. PayPal will take money for no reason or without providing any reason at all. They just fall back to “we are a service you agreed to use, we are not a bank or financial institution”. There is a whole reddit community with people commiserating. Lots of people lose their rent money, their business funds, their huge consultant contract payments, their school tuition etc. Often using paypal without imagining that its not a real company with a phone center and a system you can go to for an appeal, but some rinkydink black box of thievery with no real human contact and no legal presence anywhere you can tackle them and make them accountable.
eBay is the man in the middle between buyers and sellers, and overall the total marketplace is in decline in terms of buyers, dollars and sales volume. There is a situation where eBay has this shrinking pool of people spending money, and so they have enshittified their system by breaking search results and charging sellers to advertise/promote their listings. Essentially, surplus sellers compete to purchase the scarce buyer now. Its a doom loop.
In both cases it is hard to understand why all their competitors aren’t beating them. For example, things like Craigslist or Facebook marketplace have a very lucrative opportunity and a big head start, but nobody has really challenged eBay…its confusing.
They have massive market share. First-mover advantage is quite a powerful thing. The barrier to entry for a new competitor in either eBay’s or PayPal’s marketplace is huge.
Also, this is not a new thing. eBay has been increasingly putting the squeeze on sellers since the early 2000s. It’s gotten steadily worse over that time period. And the enshittification that produces revenue for eBay also acts as a deterrent for any potential buyers, since search isn’t usable. eBay used to enforce rules against headline spamming, excessive shipping costs and other sharp practices by sellers that degrade the user experience, but don’t seem to bother anymore. At the same time, legit sellers get screwed in myriad ways.