Why Evercore Downgraded eBay?

It seems there is no good news in the market for eBay Inc EBAY shareholders currently.  Right when the Street was busy speculating possible damage Alibaba can do to eBay, comes the news that analysts from Evercore have downgraded eBay, not because of anything related to its core business, but due to its payment processing subsidiary, PayPal.

Ken Sena, Internet Analyst at Evercore, was recently on CNBC to discuss why his firm downgraded eBay and the problems PayPal is facing in the payments and transactions space.

“I think a lot of speculation comes out with all the new announcements around PayPal or payments, that there is a risk in the payment business for PayPal,” Sena said. “We really just wanted to make sure that we were doing our work there to understand where would the risk come from and I think that while there are some big names announcement in terms of Apple Pay obviously, the real risk just comes down to the fact that demand channels, you can include social in that, you can include search, you can include marketplace players, they are all getting close to the sellers […]”

When asked about which platform has been successful to attract customers away from PayPal, Sena replied, “[…]I think, the thing that has made it harder for I think the issuers to want to come into this space where PayPal has competed is the fact that they do have that greater convenience and the ability to authenticate and that scale was needed to do so, but now whether its Apple Pay providing it from the OS layer or its Google in terms of integrating with merchants on the back-ends through how they are buying their keywords and search traffic or marketplace players just saying look you can buy with your stored payment credentials. They have a number of choices in the back-end […]”

Shares of eBay were recently  trading at $54.44, up 0.03%.