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eBay Bans Google Payments
whoever57 writes "eBay has added Google Checkout to the list of payment options banned on eBay. A recent update to the Accepted Payments Policy includes Google Checkout (click on 'Show' next to 'Some Examples' to reveal the list).
More comments on this action can be found at the eBay Strategies Blog."
I want to be the first to predict Google sues eBay for monopolistic practices or some other restriction on open and fair trade! <8^) This is just begging those two extremely rich guys up Highway 101 to see who has the best lawyers and legs to stand on. Honestly, IANAL, but I don't see it as within the rights of eBay to dictate how people accomplish the financial transactions for Rearranging the World's Junk, as they are merely the facilitators.
I also predict Google will win, but eBay will try to make it as clunky as possible.
There's just something about the culture within eBay which is visible to outside world, that these people are real dorks when it comes to business, but like Microsoft, were in the right place at the right time, which seems to go a very long way in business and the public forgiving leaders for bad practices.
And that wouldn't have anything at all to do with PayPal being a property of eBay and further lining their pockets. ;-)
What next, coining their own money and then claiming payments can only be made with their own eBucks? I think the US Federal Reserve would have a thing or two to say about that.
Then again, this could be a push to more people offering their stuff on Craig's List. I wonder if eBay's 25% interest in that would be leveraged to interfer.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
IANAL, but I'm curious, could this be considered monopolistic practice?
"What does slashdotting mean?"
"You've never heard of slashdot?"
"I know it makes websites not work."
That Google had started Google Checkout. Perhaps since it's new eBay will be sure to give it a 'really close look' before they approve it, you know, for the benefit of the (ummm) users. You can trust them, they have a lot of good in house knowledge of Internet payment.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
I have been using them for years and they keep getting more expensive and more restrictive.
Unfortunately, there isn't a good alternative yet.
I've been banned from eBay and I've had nothing to do with payments ... which is probably why they banned me come to think of it.
Cant beat em, ban em. When will they learn.
it's not so much that I'm surprised they banned google checkout, it's that I'm shocked they specifically allow Canadian Tire Money.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
I don't understand how eBay can say a type of payment can not accepted. Doesn't it depend on the person selling it what methods of payment they use? What if eBay didn't like Mastercard, could they say that Mastercards can not be accepted by anyone using eBay? Does this mean that someone like me who REFUSES to use Paypal can never buy anything on eBay, because I must go through their payment system?
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Allowed:
Payment Services permitted on eBay: Allpay.net, Bidpay, Canadian Tire Money, cash2india, CertaPay, Checkfree.com, hyperwallet,com, Moneybookers.com, Ozpay.biz, Payko.com, Paymate.com.au, Propay.com, XOOM
Verboten:
Payment Services not permitted on eBay: AlertPay.com, anypay.com, AuctionChex.com, AuctionPix.com, BillPay.ie, ecount.com, cardserviceinternational.com, CCAvenue, ecount, e-gold, eHotPay.com, ePassporte.com, EuroGiro, FastCash.com, Google Checkout, gcash, GearPay, Goldmoney.com, graphcard.com, greenzap.com, ikobo.com, Liberty Dollars, Moneygram.com, neteller.com, Netpay.com, Nochex.com, paychest.com, payingfast.com, paypay, Postepay, Qchex.com, rupay.com, scripophily.com, sendmoneyorder.com, stamps, Stormpay, wmtransfer.com, xcoin.com
Why sue them when they can probably implement auctions.google.com in much less time. I am pretty sure google could implement a much better auction setup than eBay, and the kicker? They won't ban you from using paypal.
This shows that eBay fears Google's new service. Ebay is starting to show its age and lack of innovation. It needs competition from the likes of Google and anyone else that can challenge them. I stopped using eBay due to the high fees. Good luck Google and I hope you bring a good fight!
http://religiousfreaks.com/eBay provides a number of non-paypal alternatives and it's not about monopolistic practices. They have a list of accepted vendors on their website which includes Allpay.net, Bidpay, Canadian Tire Money, cash2india, CertaPay, Checkfree.com, hyperwallet,com, Moneybookers.com, Ozpay.biz, Payko.com, Paymate.com.au, Propay.com, and XOOM. In addition, any merchant-type VISA/Mastercard/etc account is valid, as is a direct exchange of checks, wire transfers (bank to bank), etc.
The list of unapproved money exchanges includes a lot of services including Western Union, so the hue and cry about antitrust and "eBay only allows their own stuff" is nothing more than a bunch of smoke without a fire. eBay specifically states that any "new" service without a track record of privacy protection and customer service will be scrutinized and most likely prohibited until it has some history.
Everyone's quick to bitch and whine about eBay not going after fraud, not going after bad sellers, not backing them up on financial transactions and the like yet when eBay DOES try and show some spine and protection everyone piles on. It has less to do with the "paypal competition" than it does with "we have no idea how stable, how reliable and how safe this service is and we're saying no until such time as it does appear to be safe, private and protected"
Pick a direction to go, guys... do you want eBay to get the hell completely out of your way and act like nothing more than a broker and middleman or do you want them to try and put stuff in place to protect people because you can't have it both ways.
-- Gary F.
Google Auctions.
eBay, just like PayPal, are in a position of almost total dominance. Google are one of few companies in a position to compete with them.
If you can't join them, beat them.
Then eBay would ban Paypal, since Paypal is notorious for ripping off customers, refusing to arbitrate disputes like they're supposed to, and sit on your money for a week when you want to transfer funds to pay for a purchase. After all, it's not like eBay has a vested interest in the continued support of allowing paypal while banning the non-evil Google, right? Oh wait a second, Paypal = feeBay. Can you say anticompetitive business practice where they are leveraging a monopoly in one market segment in order to maintain dominance in another?
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Google has announced that due to large amounts of fraud taking place at eBay.com they will now block all of their pages to protect its users. Wonder how feeBay would feel about that one. Or better yet just quit taking eBay's money and see how they fair without some advertising on their site.
I think of Google as the "kindly predator." It makes its rounds around several industries and outdoes everyone whose services it competes with.
Do you really think that Google will settle with a lawsuit or court settlement? This may very well be one of the leading reasons to an upcoming auction service, perhaps an eBay killer, likely named gBay.
if i use paypal do i also collect $200?
http://www.ronpaul2008.com/ Ron Paul for President 2008 http://www.infowars.com/
Strange, considering they won't accept Canadian cash.
Canadians without a credit card cannot make online payments with paypal.
They will claim that a credit card is not required to use paypal, but once you have provided them with all of your personal info and banking information, they will tell you, oh - Canadians are required to have a credit card to use paypal. I was suprised by this underhanded information collection and false advertising by a supposedly trustworthy business.
Then I read some of the horror stories here: http://www.paypalsucks.com/ Scary stuff!
P.S. Does anybody know when/if slashdot intends to fix the pagination of threads? Its a pretty horrific bug for a techie site and makes browsing long threads (as this one will be) very frustrating...
eBay specifically states that any "new" service without a track record of privacy protection and customer service will be scrutinized and most likely prohibited until it has some history.
Paypal has some history
eBay provides a number of non-paypal alternatives and it's not about monopolistic practices. They have a list of accepted vendors on their website which includes Allpay.net, Bidpay, Canadian Tire Money, cash2india, CertaPay, Checkfree.com, hyperwallet,com, Moneybookers.com, Ozpay.biz, Payko.com, Paymate.com.au, Propay.com, and XOOM. In addition, any merchant-type VISA/Mastercard/etc account is valid, as is a direct exchange of checks, wire transfers (bank to bank), etc.
I had to check for myself after reading the above to verify that the inclusion of Canadian Tire Money in that list wasn't a joke. It really is there!
Few Canadians would accept CT$ as a form of payment. Many would consider an attempt to do so to be a goofy joke, or worse. Yet eBay won't accept GooglePay, or even more established providers like Neteller. Hmmm...
(Note for those who don't know: Canadian Tire is a chain of hardware-turned-department stores whose gimmick is that they provide currency-like coupons as cashback on purchases.)
Don't take a percentage of the sales.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
They may include other methods, but are these a threat to Paypal?
Fight Spammers!
Okay, I'm guessing, maybe this is how it happened:
An eBay executive was sitting around thinking, how can I get $5,000,000 of bad, sink-the-company publicity for almost free?
YES, that's it!!!! Do something against Google, which is, today, the equivalent of doing something against cute kittens.
It has a monopoly on auctions.
Except for some specific niche markets, eBay is The Place to go for online auctions. It's as dominant as Microsoft is in operating systems.
You don't get to use a monopoly in one area to manipulate the market in another.
Actually, Kmart own Sears
Do something against Google, which is, today, the equivalent of doing something against cute kittens.
Those kittens are only acting cute and doing cute things to trick you into feeding them and letting them into your bed. Don't be another victim.
You know, it seems more often then not, when I search Google for a product, I sure get a lot of Ebay auction listings in the search results. I would imagine this brings many people into the Ebay auction scene when they otherwise would not have considered bidding instead of buying. Many, MANY people, I bet.
Perhaps Google should consider removing all ebay auctions from their search results? I'm sure the same phony logic that prohibits Google payments from ebay auctions could be used to remove auctions from search results, such as:
"Ebay auctions are not categorically safe transactions, so as a safety precaution, we are eliminating ebay auctions from our search results. Please consider purchasing your new from the following vendors who have an established track record. And coincidentally, these vendors accept payments with Google Payments."
Let's see who needs who then, ebay...
And yet nothing is said of Yahoo, who assists the Chinese authorities with hunting down and incarcerating political dissidents who use their email service. Read that again for emphasis. Google is evil for simply filtering search results?
Google isn't the only service which has catered to China to get access to the market. What, were you sitting around waiting for them to make a move counter to their motto so you could shout to all of Slashdot "I TOLD YOU SO!?"
SRSLY.
This may be true, but I would consider it a natural monoploly.
But that's not the point: it's never been illegal to have a monopoly in the first place. When you leverage your monopoly in one market to compete unfairly in another, you've crossed the line. Google has already directly threatened to bring anti-trust cases, so I'd guess that's where this is all headed.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I quote:
I wonder why eBay believes Google Checkout is unsafe, unreliable and/or inconvenient? Seriously, this isn't an obscure, complicated, foreign payment system. It's pretty obvious to me why they really did this, and with this, they're most likely lying about it.
As the link in the article summary also says, even calling Google Checkout something lame like being "too new" doesn't hold much water, given what Google Checkout is.
I have nothing against eBay doing this, but only if they up front told either exactly why, the harsh reality and competition, or didn't comment on it at all. Anything would be better than lying or spreading FUD about certain competitors like this. It's really bad style IMO.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I know it's "wrong", but really...corporations are allowed to do what they want.
Uhm... no. There are laws and rules and regulations they have to follow, just like there are laws and regulations and rules *you* have to follow.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Y'all are postulating what Google should do. Have they even made a statement? Maybe they are negotiating with EBay right now, and EBay is holding out temporarily while they hash it out?
All you litigation-prone folk would make bad business managers. Google and EBay are both profitable companies. Litigation for its own sake is for losers. They are right now negotiating. That's business.
Be heard || Be herd
It was mentioned on Slashdot last May that rumors were circulating about Microsoft acquiring Ebay:
3 1&from=rss
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/27/06502
The New York Post wrote:
"May 26, 2006 -- For several weeks Microsoft has been in discussions about a possible acquisition of online auctioneer eBay, The Post has learned.
According to multiple sources close to the matter, Microsoft has considered buying eBay and merging it with its MSN portal - a deal that would give MSN and eBay considerable clout to take on Google. "
http://www.nypost.com/business/64226.htm
There must surely be more to this move threat of eBay's than meets the eye. On the simple face of things I think eBay refusing Google payments would be like eBay cutting off its nose to spite its face. Google is the "golden child" of the moment and has tremendous clout and cache. EBay is brimming with fraud and losing many of its best sellers to Amazon. Customers who get ripped of by bogus sellers get little help from eBay or PayPal and there is an increasing resentment against them. EBay to refusing Google payments would just paint it even more into a corner. Seeing eBay's threat against a Microsoft merger would make more sense - even if its still a bad idea.
Let me start by saying I agree with you... pick a direction.
Fact is however google checkout is backed by Citi Bank so I am pretty sure it is going to be considered safe and secure. e-bay just does not want to admit it. Citi is not known for taking risks, although since they cornered the 7-11 ATM market I have begun to wonder.
As I posted last week on that Google Checkout story ( http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=189880&cid =15630137 ), eBay explicitly bans ALL payment services that eBay hasn't reviewed and approved; and I guarantee they're either going to take years to 'review' Google Checkout, or they'll find some reason "for your protection" to permanently ban Google Checkout.
o cus=bs&sbrftog=1&catref=C6&from=R10&satitle=%22goo gle+checkout%22&sacat=-1%26catref%3DC6&bs=Search&f ts=2&fsop=1%26fsoo%3D1&coaction=compare&copagenum= 1&coentrypage=search&sargn=-1%26saslc%3D2&sadis=20 0&fpos=75050&ftrt=1&ftrv=1&saprclo=&saprchi=)
The interesting thing is to see how strictly eBay will enforce this rule - if they're really going to focus on forcing Google Checkout out of eBay, or if it'll be yet another rule that is only enforced from time to time.
The company I work for is an eBay PowerSeller, and we've noticed there's basically three types of policy violations in eBay's eyes:
1. those that eBay checks for when you list an item (try listing an item with 'pearl' in the title sometime to see what I'm talking about) and then either denies your listing or displays a warning message and flags your listing;
2. violations that eBay only acts on when reporting by another user (usually NOT a buyer, it's almost always a competitor);
3. violations that eBay is worried enough about that they write a program to automatically scan all open listings looking for violations.
Right now, it looks like Google Checkout falls into the second type - there's over 3,000 active listings that mention accepting Google Checkout (ref. http://search-desc.ebay.com/search/search.dll?sof
So eBay obviously hasn't stepped up enforcement of this rule. However, if the number of current listings that mention Google Checkout drops suddenly, then it will be obvious that eBay has started treating Google Checkout like an item in the third type, not the second. This would be a policy shift to explicitly combat Google Checkout, instead of just discouraging it.
I don't think PayPal would be around today, or would have the market share it does, if it wasn't for eBay buying them out and then cramming PayPal down everyone's throats. The stories I could tell about how PayPal really "protects" both the buyers and the sellers and how completely they've managed to brainwash so many buyers and sellers.... But as long as eBay is "not an auction" and PayPal is "not a bank" and "not a credit card", I don't see anything changing any time soon. eBay has already shown that it is all but unbeatable in the auction marketplace (look at Yahoo Auctions, and they're -free- now; Overstock.com auctions are another competitor that is all but defeated) - they've so completely tied PayPal into eBay and integrated it into so many of their requirements (there's certain buying and selling requirements that force you to establish a PayPal account, even if you never plan to accept or use PayPal) that I don't see anyone defeating PayPal, at least in the auction marketplace, any time soon.
Google's best remaining chance to take PayPal on, head-on, would be to setup Google Auctions, and even then, eBay really has captured a frightening amount of loyalty and dedication from hundreds of thousands of buyers and sellers...it would be an interesting fight.
First off, I'm totally close to this business - and this was an anticipated move, predicted it almost 2 years ago now. eBay needs to protect their business for the upcoming storm. I fully expect eBay to be remembered in a few years similarly to the Modem (remember those?) .. yeah people still use 'em, but most everybody's got a broadband connection.
Google isn't going to release auctions, auctions are so 2001. NOBODY WANTS TO BID. The stuff you bid on is used crap, and honestly even then it falls into the "Working crap" and "broke crap". eBay is transitioning to a fixed price marketplace, so is Google. (Don't believe me, check out eBay express)
It doesn't matter where you buy online -- the price battles online are over, they were over last year, price differentials are minimal. If anything eBay sellers are at a disadvantage due to all the fees they incurr and the higher overhead from the resulting support cost. The next frontier is mobile commerce, or perhaps more appropriately "local commerce" -- which is where Google is clearly headed. All the analysts seem to miss that Google has a really clear 3 year plan, and it's pretty freaking awesome - here's how it goes:
1. Online prices are too similar, they are irrelvant.
2. Who has a product closest to me, and is reliable, lets buy it from them.
3. Will Google allow a local retailer to match "best price", or perhaps even come close -- you betcha.
Within two years -- i'll be able to buy an 19" LCD monitor for $99 from GoogleBase, after it negotiates the best price for me, then tells me to go pick it up at the local circuit city or fry's, where I pay via Google Payments when I arrive to pick it up (probably via my phone). Yupe, it's right around the corner.
The store will try to upsell me on other items while i'm there.
Google will get a cut of the entire sale, in exchange they'll be more likely to send more buyers to that store. The stores that do the poorest job upselling, will see less buyers (think Adwords).
Ban Google for possible "fraud" concerns? If that's the case, eBay should ban Paypal and itself!! Those two are the main gateways of fraud if there ever was one.
eTrade SUCKS
Goog could do that and give eBay a hurtin'
They've got a list of qualifications on their site, and the important one is that:
* Whether the payment service has a substantial historical track record of providing safe and reliable financial and/or banking related services (new services without such a track record generally cannot be promoted on eBay)
That's been eBay's policy since way before Google came up with this brand new system of theirs. And the fact remains that Google has absolutely no past track record in financial transactions. While google is a big name in other services, eBay has absolutely no way of verifying the security measures that Google Payments offer. It's probably a great service, but eBay doesn't want to stick their necks out to potential lawsuits if this brand new service turns out to have some major security hole and a bunch of eBay site users get robbed.
That's not to say you can't use such payment, you can use whatever the hell you want. You can mail the guy beads if you really want to. What eBay is saying is that you can't use their site to advertise that you accept these payments and thus imply that eBay is in some way endorsing those payments.
This was a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation for eBay. If they refuse to accept Google, which is in keeping with their stated policy, everyone sees it as some sort of monopolistic wrangling. If they accept Google, then all those other sites on the forbidden list which were excluded for the same damned reason can cry foul by saying that eBay is playing favorites and arbitrarily excluding some.
I think the prudent thing to do is leave the system in place, wait a few months (IANAL, the better legal period might be shorter or longer) to make sure google's system actually works as advertised, then start accepting it. For the sake of public relations it might be wise to make it public that this is what's going on, and say "assuming there are no major security holes, Google Payments will be added on 9/7" or whatever date they think is ample time to cover their own necks.
I have moderator points but I have to reply to this.
No hotel ever says no to cash. What they say is "if we let youe stay in our $$$$$ room we would need a valid ID and enough money as a garantee that we will not have to run after you." If you don't believe me try checking in with a card that does not have enough credit to cover your stay.
If you do not intend to pay with your card, provide it to them on check in and upon check out settle with cash. Just remind them to cancel the pre-auth on your card on C/O. They never say no to cash. Never.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
So, just what is it that makes Google Checkout inappropriate for eBay's marketplace? If that track record is anything to go by, PayPal most certainly shouldn't be allowed. Those bastards stole over a thousand bucks from me by freezing my account, and between their unreachable status and their position in a legal limbo as a quasi-bank-transfer-service-thing, I wasn't even given the option to bend over. I'd trust a new payment method which is a subset of a company with an excellent track record over an established payment method which is a subset of the rule-maker and known to screw people over regularly.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
...you can pay your Adwords bill with PayPal?
Why cut IT when your office space costs $3/sf? gibso
I think 1 and 2 most likely, but doing all these as soon as possible would be a real kick in the balls for ebay.
Life is too short to proofread.
That is not an apt analogy. eBay are not the sellers - they are just offering the service, and taking a fee. It should be up to sellers how they complete their transaction. It's not at all like department-store credit cards. They could ban payment of eBay fees by various methods, but why should they restrict their customer's private transactions?
... and then they built the supercollider.
If I want to buy something off of an auction, I would go to eBay and search for what I was looking for.
... and what really sucks is that a lot of the auction spam is for stuff where the actual auctions have been over for quite some time.
I can't stand going to Google and searching for something, only to have a bunch of auction spam pages come up in the top links
Heck yeah, let Google ban eBay and bask in the glory as we all rejoice!
Transporter_ii
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Give them an either-or choice between a charge to list and advertise the item, and a final value fee.
So you have an option to pay like a $5 fee to list something for sale for 20 days and pick an adword for the item -- if it sells, then you can make up the difference in the sale price, without the auctioneer getting an extra percentage commission when the sale completes.
Alternatively, provide an option to list and advertise the item for up to 180 days for free, but when you do sell, the auctioneer gets $1 + 2%.
In any case, it's not hard to beat eBay, because they double-dip: when they tie their product with their PayPal product, they triple-dip; the seller winds up losing 6%, assuming they sell successfully -- the PayPal fees nearly double the cost, and since the shipping fee is part of the PayPal payment too, the seller loses again.
It becomes a major losing proposition to sell anything for under $20, unless shipping fees are padded (which is of course, against the rules).
Here's why: eBay hits sellers with high fees both when they list and when they sell; the seller takes on 100% of the risk, and eBay gets to keep a payout in the form of the "item insertion fee", before an auction starts even if the item does not sell, which is based on the starting price for the item, I.E. $0.20 to list an $0.01 item, $40 to list a vehicle, $100 to list a piece of real-estate --- last I checked they even charged extra for simple common features which should be free.. like buy it now, best offer, and reserve fees; they even charge for pictures.
Its interesting, I go over and read the list of banned payment services on the ebay web page and many of them are significantly cheaper than PayPal and Google. Understandably both the seller and the buyer would like to know that they can pay less fees when they are buying/selling or transfering funds around the world. It sounds very anti competitive, Although I am not sure about US laws but the Mastercard Worldcup issue sounds almost to familure.
Perhaps Google should consider removing all ebay auctions from their search results?
Given the kind of ebay ads you (used to?) get on Google, maybe that'd be a good thing.
As a russian language speaker, I have to say that "eBay" does sound terrible enough already.
FYI: eBay sounds close to russian word meaning "f*ck"
May Peace Prevail On Earth
Well, I suppose they have the right to do it play hardball if they want. And users have the right to make a lot of noise about it.
I think the reason Google is so popular among this crowd is that they tend to rise above this sort of thing. For instance if you search for an address they offer the yahoo maps option as well. If you have a gmail account, they do several things that allow you to avoid lock-in (allowing you to use a different email as the from address, forwarding mail for free, etc). Google may be as greedy as the rest of them, it's just that their strategy for making the most money involves being perceived (by those who pay attention) as being "non evil". And that's good, I hope more companies adopt that strategy. And I hope people do pay attention.
So who knows if what ebay is doing is illegal. It is against the interests of its users, as well as being disingenuous to say the least. When a company does such a thing, I hope the users continue to make a big deal of it.
What really sucks they set the shipping rates charged to the customer, keep part of what they charge the customer, and on top of that, take a commission out of the shipping reimbursement as well!
For example, a customer selects expidited shipping, amazon charges them $7.83 for it. They then reimburse the seller $4.99 - AND charge a commission on that, so you ACTUALLY only get $4.24. Then they charge an additional 15% + $1. So when I sell a $20 item, the customer pays $27.83 to get it, and I get $19.82, BUT still have to pay for expidited shipping, so I pocket $15.77.
If I sold the same item on eBay w/Paypal for $20 and charged the same $7.83 for S&H (eBay lets you set it for whatever you want, within reason, and doesn't charge you a commission on it), by the time I paid eBay, PayPal, AND the USPS, I'd have $21.27 left.
Even ignoring shipping, with Amazon I get $19.82 of the $27.83 charged to the customer (Amazon got 29%) and with eBay I get $25.32 (eBay got 9%).
That's three times as much of the customer's money going lost to Amazon as is lost to eBay. It's worse when you factor in that paypal gives you free delivery confirmation too.
paintball
Firstly, that is probably the policy that will get them in trouble. They are clearly using their monopoly to prevent new players in the industry.
Either they accept that Google's track record for online payments (for AdSense) is safe and effective, or they admit that they are trying to stomp on anyone who tries to compete with PayPal.
I think this just highlights what a mess the whole issue of net banking/payment is in.
I use several sites for buying goods, but EBay is a good example, so I'll use that:
As noted throughout this discussion, EBay only allows certain payment methods - foremost is Paypal. The others aren't anything like as useful because they are restricted to a geographic location (err.. why?) or just a way of processing credit card payments. Worse still, a lot of sellers seem to be locked into Paypal as well. So, OK, I use Paypal - I don't have any major reasons to worry about that except... Paypal won't allow me to use my (Italian) bank account for payments. Others, such as netteller will, but they in turn won't allow me to transfer funds to Paypal. In fact, even though I have several on-line account facilities, it is very nearly impossible to move funds from one to the other.
What gives? These days I can route data from anywhere to anywhere via the 'net using a plethora of methods; but not money. I wonder if this is deliberate.
IT'S A MESS!
I think the real issue here is not that google's alternative is new, it's that it's google. They have no problem allowing small, unknown payment alternatives -- because they are small and unknown. Anything branded Google, however, is just a bit more threatening. . .
When eBay first started off waaaaaay back in the 90s, they charged a nickel for listings under $10, and a dime for everything else. That was it. People used to MAIL in postcards with their fee taped on. It was mostly just the Bay Area (hence the name), and it was a very nice and active market, lots of kitschy stuff, lots of really good deals ("Hey, I love this Chagall painting, but I really gotta pay my alimony, so it's yours for $100"), and generally just lots of goodness.
Fast forward 10 years, and eBay is now a blight on Internet business. Beyond the fraud, the chicanery, the snake oil, and the exorbitant fees, eBay is simply no longer a viable place to do "garage sale"-style auction business. The community at large is no longer involved in the selling business - only buying. The selling has been taken over by Power Sellers, retail stores, and scam artists.
What we as the tech community in specific and the world community in general need to do is re-create eBay every 10 years (that appears to be the life cycle under which a grassroots auction site becomes a lumbering behemoth of corporate blase.) Someone just write some good open-source auction code - a RDMBS, a CMS, some RSS feeds and an open-source shopping cart/payment system (that is payment-platform independent) - and then we'll just create another eBay every decade. It doesn't even sound particularly hard to do, and as long as we're clear up front that there's probably not a lot of money in it (since eBay has the entrenchment factor), we can make something, you know, for kids! And for everyone else who just wants to sell their backlog of shi^H^^Htuff* sitting in their garage.
Make it easy, make it cheap, make it roll up, make a code snippet you can dump on mySpace or liveJournal or a Wordpress site, make sniping impossible (I like the idea of extending the bidding by 5 minutes every time there's a bid), make it easy to translate, make it secure, make it standards compliant, and guess what? You've probably got a Web 2.0 hit on your hands.
* Thanks, George Carlin.