Chinese Version
07-10-2021， Saturday, Cloudy
While reading a comment about the shift of online market: “The same thing that happened with books two decades ago and clothing a decade ago has now happened to the furniture market.” I could not help thinking of my work experience from 20 years ago, a little-known historical story of the fierce battle between eBay and PayPal in 2001.

In 2001, my boss Jim gave me many opportunities to work side-by-side with Vicki who was familiar with the whole eBay system at that time, in order to understand the essential of the already big and complicated eBay software system. At that time, Vicki was mainly responsible for eBay’s SYI system (SellYourItems, commonly known as the selling system on eBay website), so that year I mostly worked on developing SYI functions.

In the spring of 2001, Jim assigned me to work with Vicki to develop eBay’s first payment system upgrade: providing eBay sellers the choice of using Billpoint, eBay’s internal payment system, while uploading their items to the eBay website, so that buyers can select Billpoint for payment during their checkout. This project will change both the front-end user interface page and the back-end data processing logic, to make the Billpoint payment option as a permanent dominant attribute for eBay users, similar to a person’s height.

This was a big project scheduled to be delivered in about five weeks. After Vicki and I worked together on this project for two weeks, the project was suddenly called off.

When Jim told us the news, he tried to comfort us by saying: “Cancelling a project like this, having been developed by two developers for already two weeks, isn’t a development problem. ”

After the project was canceled, Vicki and I went to a meeting for the project with many other people. I was surprised to see that a lawyer on eBay was leading the meeting, because in my previous experience, the project managers were always leading these meetings.

The lawyer first explained to us the essence of our project: “This project tries to help eBay sellers put their wallets in the Billpoint system.”

I immediately felt that the lawyer summarized our project accurately and concisely. Because this project will add a “permanent attribute of Billpoint payment option” to eBay users at the back-end inside eBay system, but the specific payment information will be completed by sellers at the Billpoint side and the payment information will stored in the Billpoint system instead of the eBay system.

The lawyer then said, “This project is similar to putting your wallet in someone else’s purse. It’s very unsafe and unwise. So we cancelled it. ”

This experience made me aware that ideology is more important than technology!

Six months later, in the fall of 2001, as the tech leader, I designed and worked with a team of developers to develop the first generation of eBay Checkout, to allow buyers to choose Billpoint as the payment while placing their orders on the eBay website. This is a new process outside of the SYI system, and it is also the first time for the eBay system to record and store the buyers’ checkout processes.

I still remembered that during our routine project discussion sessions, Jeff, the product manager of eBay checkout, a very calm short gentleman, always reminded us with enthusiasm: “The purpose of introducing checkout is to squeeze PayPal out with Billpoint. So we need to think about how to make Billpoint stick together with the checkout process.”

A few days after the eBay Checkout was pushed out to the eBay websit, Lilian, the project manager, suddenly asked me, “Our business analyst found out that too little checkout data were recorded in the database. What do you think the problem could be?”

I immediately replied confidently, “Developers and testers had repeatedly tested all flows of this large new project before it went live. It is impossible to miss any buyer checkout process!”

Then I thought about it a bit and said, “The data of checkout process will be decentralized and stored on eleven different database machines, just like the data of eBay users and eBay items are decentralized in eleven different database machines. If a business analyst only goes to one database machine to extract checkout data, he will only get one tenth of the data. Of course, it will be too little. ”

Later, Lilian told me: “You are right. Now, the business analysts see a large amount of buyer checkout data from eleven database machines.”

The recorded data of the checkout process shows that very few buyers used Billpoint as the payment option during their checkout. Further analysis shows that many eBay sellers provided a link to PayPal on the item description section, a free text format for the sellers to enter anything without restrictions. So the buyer still had the opportunity to choose PayPal as the checkout payment even though the Billpoint payment option is stickied during the eBay checkout process.

Subsequently, the SYI system specially added a new function, strip JS (strip Javascript), to remove Javascript from item description to prevent sellers from providing PayPal links or buttons in the item description section on eBay website. I remembered one Friday evening, I was called to analyze a serious website issue that “the function of SYI strip JS in item description” failed recently. This request came from Jeremy K, a young leader in our Development Department of eBay at that time. I took this request to another office building to get Justin E, a master of Javascript (web dynamic language) at that time, to analyze the problem together. We both agreed that the changes in recent weeks will not cause “strip JS function to failure”, so the function failure could not have been caused by eBay developers.

Later, I heard that PayPal’s Javascript developers are better than eBay’s at that time. Therefore PayPal always managed to dynamically add its links or buttons to eBay’s item description section (There were as many security vulnerabilities as competitive opportunities in the early days of the online market), so eBay buyers could still choose to pay with PayPal during checkout.

Less than a year after the launch of the first generation of eBay’s Checkout, eBay bought PayPal on October 3, 2002. I felt very sad that our much worked-on product of eBay Checkout was a failure.

A few years later, when I told a product manager that I was the tech leader of eBay’s first generation of Checkout, I was told: “The contribution of Checkout function is collecting big data to help eBay executives make a major decision to give up Billpoint and buy PayPal.”

Big data thus plays a critical role in corporate decision-making.

eBay’s decentralized database in 2001:

A core technical usage of eBay’s item category is providing a decentralization standard for SYI to store eBay items (sellers’ goods) in different databases, based on which category the items belong to. I remembered that there were eleven decentralized databases for eBay items, namely catHost0 to catHost9 plus default catHost.

As eleven database machines cannot be down at the same time, eBay’s website will never be paralyzed due to a database crash. There is always some database out of the eleven still serving traffic, so eBay buyers can view and buy some items and eBay sellers can upload some new items, etc.