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eBay To Buy Skype For $2.6 Billion
rfunches writes "It's not a rumour anymore. BBC News online reports that eBay will pay 'half the amount in cash and the other half in stocks to create an unparalleled e-commerce and communications engine'." The $2.6 billion purchase would give eBay access to the VoIP market, of which Skype claims it has 2 million users online at any given time. BBC speculates that eBay will use Skype to allow sellers and bidders to communicate via voice; I have also heard that live auctions a la Sothebys might also be a possibility. Also reported at Wall Street Journal (registration), New York Times."
Skype is in for a little surprise if eBay pays with Paypal. Whoops, your account is locked, sorry.
I have also heard that live auctions a la Sothebys might also be a possibility.
Well, there's a definitive statement for you....
I guess today is a passable day to die.
...now stories that "interesting" about Corp XY going to buy Skype won't gonna make it in between of news that matter that often any more.
A+++++!1111111 would tlak with agin
Skype is not built on open standards like SIP and remains isolated to its own so-called "Peer to Peer" network. It is to the Gizmo Project as AIM is to Jabber.
Furthermore, eBay has a history of poor human rights concerns and owns PayPal, probably the worst on-line payment site ever created.
I predict more consumer-hostile behavior from eBay and will continue to boycott all of its products.
I'm not Seth Finkelstein. I still speak the truth.
Great, so now instead of people emailing me about my Ebay auctions, they can call me at any time and ask, "How does that there Tivo thing work anyway? Can I watch HBO if I don't have cable? Can you explain it to me?"
What's your damage, Heather?
How are they going to earn that back from a "free" VoIP service?
From the article :
.... eBay is also attracted by the idea of letting its buyers and sellers talk to each other via their computers ...
Personally, I'm not sure that I would want eBay buyers and sellers to contact me by voice. For a start, it means that to buy or sell effectively, you would need to be online a lot of the time.
Plus, once they have your Skype address, it would open up the system to SPAM voice calls pestering you to buy more things that you don't want or need.
Maybe not...
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Yet another company purchasing another completely unrelated company simply because they feel the need to dump their cash somewhere. In te end, one company always ends up dragging the other down.
One of the reasons eBay has is that they can use Skype to let buyers and sellers talk to each other; but my eBay name and Skype name aren't the same. If some contacts buyer/seller through Skype with eBay screenname as Skype name, they're is going to be some potential for social engineering.
Clearly eBay should be made to bid for it ;-)
Here's the link to their announcement
Summation 2
BBC speculates that eBay will use Skype to allow sellers and bidders to communicate via voice;
They can do that already, for free, using any of the IM and VoIP solutions that are out there. eBay didn't have to buy Skype for that. I suspect most sellers just don't want to be bothered, otherwise they'd list an IM address and phone number.
I'm not even sure why Skype is considered so valuable; the technology is commonplace, and VoIP-to-POTS gateways are offered by many companies. And between the Telcos and Microsoft, any competitor is going to be squashed.
Paypal's Micropayments and Skype? Probably convenient for quick overseas calls to POTS lines...
Yet another up-and-coming technology bought out by corporate mammoths.
I remember when even eBay was a fledgling company, trying to find it's market.
Real programmers can write assembly code in any language. -- Larry Wall
As a metter of fact, it does
95% of all sigs are made up.
Escrow call services.
With a large US company owning Skype I think we can take for granted that getting SkypeIn sorted out with the telecomm authorities of smaller, European countries will simply not happen. I expect Skype will now grow much more US-oriented than before - I simply can't imagine why Ebay would bother with, or even understand those Euro-centric problems.
Time to start looking seriously at the existing competition, small as it is.
Great, another useful tool brought down to its knees by a company with a need to buy something 'sexy' without an intelligent business plan. Thank you eBay! Ugh....
"EBay plans initially to pay $1.3 billion in cash and $1.3 billion in stock and to make a further payout of up to $1.5 billion by 2008 or 2009 if financial targets are met, giving the deal a total value of up to $4.1 billion, the source said."
p e=technologyNews&summit=&storyid=2005-09-12T081656 Z_01_HO227963_RTRIDST_0_TECH-SKYPE-EBAY-DC.XML
Here, check this out:
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsarticle.aspx?ty
... as it is does not use the accepted SIP VOIP standard, nor does it interoperate with other VOIP providers.
Get yourself a real VOIP provider that uses SIP.
There are several applications that do the same thing Skype does, have been out longer than Skype. I tried Skype once a few years ago when I heard you could make "free calls from the internet", only to realize it was a misleading statement.. I've been using PC-to-PC calls for awhile with decent quality (better than skype's) but was looking for PC-to-Phone, for free.. now that would be something.
- There's no sourcecode
- There are no toolkit requirements
- There's no glibc version listed
Without sourcecode they may as well have not bothered but without telling me what GUI toolkit or glibc version are required; I won't bother.What a bizarre combination, auctions and VoIP telephony. I can't but help think that this is part of the current fad of big net companies buying up the small-but-cool app stuff?
I mean you can see where Google's going with their purchases, but Yahoo with Konfabulator and eBay with Skype seem to be pointing in a new direction of desktop application acquisition.
For that kind of cash, eBay could have developed an in-house solution at a fraction of the price. Oh well, time to raise the Buyer's and Seller's rates on eBay, again...
Its actually about 4 billion. There is 1.5 billion performance based option as well.
I think I need to buy some puts on E-Bay.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
give us some examples? I'm sure there are some, but what is the reasoning behind it?
AOL/Time Warner is a good place to start
Skype for Linux requires glibc 2.3.3 or greater and Qt 3.2 or greater. ever heard of FAQs.
I am not advocating skype here, but do check your facts before posting.
95% of all sigs are made up.
I think the main parallel to find in comparing the recent tech acquisition spree to that of 1999/2000 is that companies are applying the "buy now figure it out later" synergy strategy again. I think a lot of these companies are seeing a vague future for themselves as desktop application providers in Web X.0 -- but they are scrambling in a land grab on search, voip, mobile...I mean, when Google buys something as fad-ish as dodgeball.com and ebay gets into voip, to me it signals speculation and hedging on these companies' parts. They have no clue what will work and what will not -- and eBay shareholders should be upset that eBay is gambling billions on speculative technologies.
Cheese and rice... EBAY paid this much money for simple software VoIP. Imagine if they had simply thrown $100 million at the Asterisk project with the following criteria:
1) NAT-friendly Windows and MAC VoIP client
2) NOTHING!
Seriously... If you provide clients, Asterisk already has the capability to do EVERYTHING that Skype has. They even have a NAT-friendly IAX protocol. They'd just need to develop the clients and then build a large PSTN interface.
The inefficiency in business is astounding. EBAY had money burning a hole in their pocket so their remedy was to remove the money and throw it into the fire.
I'm breathless.
More
The next invention will be a solar powered house and car combo station.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Google has been known lately for snatching up many things that have become rather popular.
eBay, for the most part, has stayed under the radar (at least, as far as corporate purchases are concerned.) However, even before they started buying things, they already had their hand in every consumer goods market with the U.S. and every other country (though not directly.)
Then they bought PayPal (what, a year ago?). This transaction made plenty of sense, as PayPal was used to pay for many of the auctions on eBay.
But now that eBay is getting Skype, are we seeing a clever purchase or the beginning of a buy-frenzy? This layman cannot see an overall connection between Skype and eBay/PayPal (aside from being general commerace tools); but that doesn't mean they can't buy Skype. And if they purchase Skype, what might they put their grubby mitts on next?
Myspace, IGN, Skype ... Google worth more than major media companies ...
Sure, we've got a costly war in Iraq, 100+B hurriance, an economy still kicked in the balls from 9/11; what we need now is some CRAZY INTERNET SPECULATION! WOOHOO!
Come on boys and girls, let's create some easily replaceable, shiny trinkets that we can sell these bozos for billions! This will fix the economy!!!!
WoooooOOOOOO!!!!!! YeaaaahhhhhhhhhHHH!
At least not on any distro that I've tried it on with this ThinkPad + USB headset.
Unlikely to ever work until it gets proper ALSA support.
LOL! I love it when the same post gets modded "insightful "and "troll" within five minutes!
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Also, remember that Skype is not an open protocol. You cannot write your own client should support for your platform be discontinued.
Yeah, because when i think communications that don't suck I think of e-Bay. This from the company that isn't a bank, isn't an auction company, and now isn't a phone company ... or at least that's what the regulators will be told.
E-Bay's use of communications suck all of their products and services are closed products, Skype is no different in that respect, but I see no way that this will improve their buisness. I really can't wait to get back to the closed days of compuserve 195782,1124!
Shows how glacial \. is.
Perhaps eBay is hoping to close the communication barrier between seller/buyer. Personally I have never had trouble with buyer/seller, but this may be good for those people who are afraid to buy online because they can not actually talk/see the person.
and just for "to allow sellers and bidders to communicate via voice" holy crap, imagine what SIP client Apple or IBM can create for $1 Billion just wondering, if skype worth $2.6 Billion so how much windows os worth?
"Steve Jobs invented the world" -- Bill W. GATES
2.6 billion..
thats in Yen right?
seriously why dont ebay hire some people to make a SIP compliant client + service...
the only reason why skype is doing well at the moment is because SIP hasn't taken of yet...
I suspect that part of the confusion is that we think of ebay as an acution company, just like we used to think of google as a search company or Microsoft as a PC OS company.
It sounds to me like ebay is trying to transform itself into a "business solutions provider" company. Starting a small business? Sell your stuff using ebay with "buy it now". Want to accept credit cards and do other business banking? We can do that. Want to offer a toll-free (or non-toll-free) number to your customers? We can do that, too.
I would not be overly surprised if they went after Quicken or a competitor next. Possibly even a shipping or storage company, too (but less likely since those aren't virtual).
Seriously, what good is a closed software-only "telephony" application when VoIP is the latest craze? With SIP, I can use an adapter to connect any common phone. With Asterisk I have a complete PBX that I can program to do anything, from call routing to voicemail to menus to different behaviour based on callerid and whatnot.
Sitting in front of a PC and being able to talk to someone is so 1999.
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
This is not about integrating VOIP into eBay's auction business. It's about large tech companies scrambling to get a share of the predicted-to-boom VOIP market.
0 0000e2511c8.html
Just recently, Microsoft purchased Teleo, which will allow MSN messenger users to make PC-to-Phone calls. Yahoo purchased Dialpad, which has similar capabilities to Skype (PC-to-PC and PC-to-Phone). And of course Google introduced Google talk, which is the first step in the process. eBay just doesn't want to be left out.
This is not really my insight. See for example:
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/d1218d8c-2097-11da-81ef-
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
As to the decentralization, if that one sever in Denmark goes down, so does the entire network (since no one will be able to log on.)
It is the best solution if you have to be able to get through firewalls and NAT.
Best Slashdot Co
You don't honestly believe that 'internal memo' from ebay is real do you? Seems rather incredible to me - no company is so idiotic as to ban talking at desks at work, and the way it is written is so ridiculous as if the writer was trying to make obvious that its a joke.
....
In any case, I don't see what it has to do with 'human rights concerns'.
Other posters have sufficiently rebutted your claim that PayPal is the 'worst on-line payment site ever created', and your Gizmo plug, so I'll resist from arguing those points
Ebay's interest in Skype has nothing to do with augmenting their auctions with calls between buyers and sellers. This is about taking those (alleged) 50 million non-paying Skypers and giving them an easy, more attractive way of paying for individual calls rather then stumping up $5. Pretty much everyone has a Paypal account and this sort of tie-up would get them using both Paypal and Skype more, with people more willing to leave cash sitting in their Paypal accounts because "I might need it for calls". This would consolidate Paypal's dominant position, something Ebay are probably anxious to do in the wake of rumours of a Google e-payment service - most people will only really bother with one payment service and, if it covers their phone calls too, sticking with Paypal will be a no-brainer.
The real killer argument for the Paypal/Skype tie-up is, however, the possibilities it opens up for a whole new generation of premium phone services and the recent repositioning of PayPal, missed by many, strongly suggests that Whitman et al realize this - after years of holding back the whole idea of micro-payments, they finally decided to granularize Paypal's fee scale, making smaller transactions viable. Before, you had to pay 30c + 3% of every transaction, leaving you with 67c from a dollar sale. Now, they are willing to take 5c + 5% instead, leaving you with 90c.
This is huge news because it makes viable a whole new layer of services. I don't think the timing of that introduction is a coincidence. I believe that Paypal are preparing the ground so that anyone who wants to set up a premium number can do so via Skype - if someone fancies themselves as a fortune teller, a Windows guru, a phone psychologist, a language translator, anything at all that can be conveyed over the phone, Skype will allow them to receive calls for which they can charge whatever they want per minute, taken directly from the customers Paypal account.
The rakes that the traditional telcos cream from premium calls are obscene, resulting in unattractive overall rates, crippling a potentially huge homebrew industry before it even began. Seriously, how many of you regularly turn to premium phone-lines when you have a problem? I can definitely understand how talking to another human being, one expert at tackling my particular problem, could be useful - the current cost, however, takes that option right out of contention. Generally, too, a premium service can only serve one country, barely giving it room to breathe market-wise.
A Skype/Paypal solution would be international, meaning a techie in Bombay could build a reputation for solving computer problems for customers in Baltimore, more easily than getting the kid down the road to drop by and certainly more cheaply than phoning Compuworld or Apple. It would also allow that kid in Bombay to keep a meaningful percentage of his per-minute fee, allowing him to keep it low. You would soon have a massive market of providers, ranging from amateurs to highly experienced professionals, all promoting their services via websites and forums, all adapting their charges and services to market conditions. By building the charging mechanism right into Skype, Paypal would find itself sitting happily in the middle of a new explosion of cash transactions.
Just like Ebay did.
And yet another useful, cheap, user-friendly technology is ripped away by a corporate Godzilla. eBay is as bad as they come when it comes to your rights and convenience (they jump through hoops to avoid any responsibility and liability), and are among the more notorious spammers out there. Can unsolicited cold calling via Skype be far behind? Still waiting for Google's PayPal alternative...
If eBay requires Paypal to pay for my Skype service, I'll be finding another VOIP provider. I've done everything I can to avoid the nastyness that Paypal is.
Chip H.
Let's hope Skype doesn't go the way of Kazaa :)
Clever signature text goes here.
Now that Skype is owned by EBay, are they going to have to make the network tappable? So much for strong encryption and decentralized routing, if that's the case.
Even if EBay is not required by law to do it, they have a history of being more cooperative with law enforcement than they need to be, even for investigations having nothing to do with auction fraud. Personally, I'm disappointed with this news.
Maybe Yahoo is hoping eBay will back out so they can make a Second Chance Offer for $2.5bn. I'm sure Skype had a Want It Now offer but they were all rejected since the Minimum Reserve was set to $2.0bn.
The listing & closing fees are going to be exorbitant. It is a good thing eBay can pay with American Express.
whats wrong with that? but there will be a hard time for other solutions to fit the regulation issues of the united states and everywhere else in the world , even if they block skype in china http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=13516&hed =China+Telecom+Blocks+Skype
regards
WorldPay, FirePay, NETeller, ProtX, BidPay, NoChex, Verisign, SecPay, FastPay, NetBanx, ChronoPay, PPPay, MoneyBookers, ACT eCash, 900Pay, Citadel, etc. etc.
There is nothing wrong with Paypal and eBay that wouldn't be cured in a heartbeat by some credible competition, but I don't see any credible competition at the moment. Auction sites (and similar listing sites) come and go, as do online payment systems. I have a few such sites that I like (e.g., Blujay.com and TheHighBidder.com) from the standpoint of user-friendliness and lower cost, but they can't deliver the traffic like eBay. One alternative for online payments that should definitely be avoided is the latest Ponzi scheme from Damon Westmoreland, called GreenZap. I have some hope for either GooglePay or AliPay (from the B2B site Alibaba.com). I would not mind seeing both competing head-to-head with PayPal. Unfortunately, in the Internet world, there is a tendency for only one company to completely dominate any particular niche -- and #2 is usually way down in the noise.
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I used to skype all my friends from one side of the continent to the other, and now with this, i don't think ebay would ever give anything for free based on their "charge you for everything they can" attitude. So long free voip , hello empty paypal account....I am looking forward to seeing what googletalk offers... "sucks to be flatulent in an empty elevator"
hey, we don't know if ebay is the winner yet, the auction still has 7+ hours left...
So eBay purchases Skype, thereby vastly increasing its effective client base. Not what I would have predicted - everyone's favourite not-being-evil search organisation didn't get to buy Skype after all.
But imagine the power in a purchase or alliance the two ultra heavyweights... EBay's worth too much for Google to buy outright at current prices (> $50bn) but the resulting search and information possibilities would be mind boggling if they could integrate effectively.
- M
( Redundancy is ) ^ n
A TV episode, featuring a leather jacketed cool guy from the 1950s, riding his motorbike over a tank containing a shark.
kiss skype good bye now as it swiftly becomes a new source of spam just like happend to ICQ when aol bought it.
Skype works behind firewalls because it can relay calls off another node that is *not* behind a firewall. If corporate goon A calls corporate goon B where both are behind a firewall, the call is going to be routed through a *random* box on the internet. It could be a PC in a college residential network or some dude's box in kerplexistan. While this solution does work it has a number of problems:
1) If the number of machines without firewalls starts to fall dramatically skype users are SOL. This could happen if most PC's have an automatic firewall enabled or broadband providers start shipping modems with built in firewalls.
2) I don't know about you but it's a bit odd routing my voice traffic through non authenticated computers - encryption be damned.
3) Routing around firewalls provides a *good* calling experience but not reliable. Skype calls can drop on you randomly. You also can have trouble connecting when you want to call. While skype is great for people who want high quality calls that work most of the time, it isn't really great when you try on rely on it.
I use skype and think it is a great product... but I don't quite understand how it people think it is worth so much money as a company.
People will start using Skype to bypass eBay and their fees and deal directly with their favorite sellers.
We must evacuate 20721. Where to?
I just know that somebody is going to show up in the last ten seconds and bid $2.7 billion. Unfortunately, eBay was at work so it missed the end.
It turned out okay, though, since this was actually the Hong Kong import version of Skype, a fact the seller carefully skirted in the description.
[insert witty quote here]
eBay will be changing its ticker to WTF.
Exciting. Too bad for me, we don't have PayPal here (Philippines).
Another possibility for commerce is negotiating on the phone then making the payment directly through Skype.
I wonder what category the auction for Skype was under. I couldn't find the Overbloated Corporate Buyout category.
I should have offered to build one for 2 billion. No, I could probably even get it working by nickel and diming it with something like 1.5 billion.
If this was a standard eBay Auction with no additional features using the eBay Calculator, if Skype's opening bid was $2.0bn and since it ended with an offer of 2.6bn, the total fees would have been $39,000,017.93.
I tried both Skype and GizmoProject.
With GP you MUST use a headset. Meanwhile, I could talk to someone with Skype using my existing iSight cam's built-in mic and my comp speakers. No issues with feedback whatsoever. This alone was worth a lot, in my opinion, as much as I am a fan of GizmoProject and SIP. And the average consumer (of which you and I are not) is not going to care about standards compliance (witness AIM, etc.)
I've used PayPal for years now with no issues, and I do like their clean site design. I think that you can take almost any company and create a thatcompanysucks.com site and populate it with true content, as no company is perfect.
I've also used eBay for some time, and their site is pretty badly designed (weird session management, searching for completed items is wacky, etc.) But... I still use 'em.
This blog post has a nice graph showing the "eBay buys Skype" buzz spike.
Simpy
You're just showing how backward you are
But E-bay got in at the last second.
If they can find 2.6 billion for skype I think that they are charging too much on their listing fees.
really bored? My blog
The original selling price was $2.0 billion until the last minute when bidding up'd it to $2.6 billion.
there is always promise but unless the promise is very obvious and can be realized early, it will likely fail. i have been through m any of these mergers at an ebay competitor and almost uniformly they have not delivered.
I would have the biggest, hardest and most painful erection of my life.
And I would run screaming and naked through the town showing it to everyone.
My bet is soon every Skype customer w/o a caller filter gets innundated with unsolicited telemarketing calls, now that e-Bay - an uber-spammer themselves - controls things?
* Ring, Ring *
"Hello, this is eBay letting you know that you've been outbid on item 501332567. Press 1 to re-enter a higher bid. Thank-you."
Skype also offers an IM service that eBay could use to pester bidders. I used to use their MSN Alerts service before eBay shut it off, so when I used MSN Messenger I would get alerts about being outbid.
For auction messages where time is of the essence, IM makes much more sense than e-mail for outbid notices.
For more information, click here.
The entire point of eBay to me is that this is not done in realtime. I put up an auction and several days later check to see who is winning and what their feedback and history looks like. I sell cellphones and I would hate to be available by voice to all the morons who send email along these lines : "Can you ship to malaysia if I pay with a french credit card because my boss is in Japan and needs a GSM phone right away" You'd be amazed at how often I hear these types of stories, despite indicating in large red text that I do not ship internationally and am not stupid. Having these people call me at 3am ? No thanks. I just closed my skype account. (well, emailed support to have them close it since there doesn't appear to be a way on the web page)
Maybe that $4.1b price tag is part of a Dutch auction?!
What else do you need?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Microsoft has never been an OS company. They have always been an application company, and most of the time made most of their money on applications. Their Mac application was at one point their largest cash cow.
There are millions of things Ebay could do:
-Allow you to use their thechnology for "turn-key" auctions websites for niche-markets (i.e an auctins site for Londoners wanting to but books in Hungarian...).
-Associate with stock-bokers in order to auction financial goods and services.
-Make Pay-Pal a real bank.
etc.etc.etc
VoIP has nothing to do with their core bussiness, if I was a shareholder I would be asking a lot of questions....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
How about we eliminate the middle man on this auction...
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Remember this? http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/07/01/14 47232&tid=158&tid=17
I had been thinking about setting up a Skype In number too. Guess I'll go for Gizmo instead.
I hardly knew ya.
This sucks, until proven otherwise, not the other way around.
paypal + skype = suxorz
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
Yes, it's "to create an unparalleled e-commerce and communications engine".
But unfortunately, it is eclipsed by several orders of magnitude by the world's largest, and truly unparalleled ecommerce and communications engine: THE INTERNET. Hey eBay, the marketing morons didn't think that comment through very well, now did they?
PayPal didn't begin for the purpose of auction payments, and if it ever was then that is an advertised lie. I remember the day PayPal eMail arrived in my Inbox: "So-and-so has sent $2xx.xx to your PayPal account. Please click 'here' to verify." The first words uttered from my mouth were verbs, as I did not sign-up for a PayPal account. I complained to the fool that "sent" the BS PayPal Payment(TM) and he said it wouldn't let him retract. So, under the threat of jail for "stealing" someone's money in a non-active PayPal account attached to my eMail account, I had no choice but send the package of expensive property. Immediatly, I went to the PayPal website and it asked some questions related in "securing claim to the funds", but no matter what I did it wouldn't agree that I am making a claim; it wouldn't send a note to prove the mailing address, and because I don't use corporate Banking accounts it wouldn't let me send the funds properly to someone else in fair exchange for needed property. And that was at a time when I was scrimping for funds. It was "advertised" as a way to Quickly(TM) move funds, when in fact it was neither quick and neither did it move funds in the conventional sense. In reality, PayPal is an unjust corporate that pools all its members funds into an interest-bearing Wells Fargo corporate Banking account, and nowhere in PayPal coerced and implied contractual agreements does it recognise anyone's claim to funds stolen into the PayPal corporation. It's all a lie, and I've been one of the most critical of PayPal ever since the appearance of its agents. There are friends I know that have incurred organized theft of much more at that hands of agents of PayPal.
PayPal, neither eBay, have made an acceptable improvement in their disrespectful venues. Most people use the money arrived in the mail from buyers verily to apply to shipping cost at the Post; this is a speady action that can only be performed when money is in hand immediatly. With an typical outfit as PayPal you can't just go anywhere and say to bill PayPal. UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE prints custom lables of PayPal on their corporate website, but it is only a distraction from the root purpose of postal mail -- corporates trie to replace customary general post and general delivery with insufficient address and vane caligraphy when all that is needed is the package to be sent and the satisfaction and discharge of both parties. PayPal, neither eBay, have been an acceptable improvement at all. When it began, no bank account was required. I still have a claim against PayPal, that which as now looking is USD 280.38 it will not return my use of it. I only want the account closed -- I'm willing to abandon claim if only the account was closed, yet PayPal runs me through the same verification scheme of which it causes estoppel.
without prejudice
Fuck! Now I actually have to _talk_ to people during a transaction?
That's so 1990's.
I think his message implied ones that are actually useful.
With PayPal you have the Holy Trinity of auction management - buyer pays you via PayPal, you pay eBay fees via PayPal, you buy USPS postage that you print yourself via PayPal.
At least PayPal is a known quantity in terms of risk managemnet.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Totally ties in with half.com or whatever that eBay store is. People could call sellers and leave voice questions instead of just using email.
A little wierd but I could see them wanting to offer it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley