Did you color the matches black with a Sharpie marker?
Most lasers under 100mW have a hard time lighting matches without a little help.
Also, did you try different distances to see where the best focus is? A match head is a much more difficult nut to crack than a simple balloon pop.
The thin latex of the balloon does not have much heat capacity and can only transfer the heat sideways, it's not a very good conductor of heat as it is, and there's almost no depth to the material. And when it's under tension from inflation, the balloon works with you, by tugging the material away from the laser point in all directions.
OTOH, the match heads are quite thick, and despite being flammable, they're solid, and have much more thermal capacity to wick away heat from the surface being lased than the skin of a balloon does.
And also, the eBay laser might be leaking a good deal of IR light. Although it's probably not focused, or collimated, and coming out more like a flashlight beam, than a laser, other than being coherent. The baloon might be "dark" to the IR, whereas the matchead is "bright" and reflective. When you look at people's clothing under a "night shot" camcorder, you can see how items that are black under visible light can be nearly white looking to IR, and vice versa.
However, if you can pop the balloon at any appreciable distance beyond a few inches, the IR leakage, if any, probably isn't helping.
