eBay Pulls Google Ads Over Marketing Stunt

odoketa writes "According to the BBC, it seems Google scheduled a party to promote their payment system (Google Checkout) on the same day as a big eBay meeting, and this made eBay mad enough to pull their ads with Google. According to the story, eBay says it's merely an 'ongoing experiment' on their marketing. 'Google hoped to alert PayPal users who would have been in Boston attending the eBay Live annual seller event to its own service, according to market experts. It could also have been seen as part of an effort to get eBay to accept Google Checkout, currently banned on the online auctioneer's site. But in a contrite manner, Google cancelled its rival function a day before it was due to happen.'"

Comments

I PRAY Google takes eBay down at some point.

[Mewtwo]

...and this is coming from someone who does fairly significant business through eBay.

eBay's fees are ridiculous now, and PayPal even moreso. eBay has continually raised their fees year after year, taking a far too large cut of small items. What's worse is that 2.9% + 30 cents bit on PayPal transactions, whether or not it was actually funded through a credit card. I understand needing to pay yourself back should someone actually pay with a credit card and get small fee on top of that, but when money is moved from one PP account to another, that costs them $0...not to mention that PayPal's fee is done on the TOTAL, not the pre-shipping price, so they end up taking 2.9% of the money that you're supposed to have to ship the item as well. ...and since eBay and PayPal are so closely knit, and almost everyone on eBay only uses PayPal to pay, trying to use any of the smaller players is pretty much futile. The only payment service that can reasonably knock PayPal off of its pedestal is Google Checkout, and eBay knows this.

Between those two things, I'm losing well over 10% on any item that doesn't cost a huge amount of money. They wonder why people do stuff like use eBay contact info to sell outside of eBay and to list $1 items with hundred or even thousand-dollar shipping cost to avoid paying eBay as much as they can.

eBay claims that they want to have payment services with established track records or something like that. Just wait a year or two, and then possibly sue for inclusion, or at least under some law about anti-competitive acts? If Google could get GBay up...

GBay + "do no evil" = death of eBay.

So hard to choose sides

[antifoidulus]

I mean, on one side we have google, a tremendously useful tool that has saved me countless hours when troubleshooting problems/doing research.

And on the other side we have paypal who called me a liar on the phone because I told them that they, not I, made a mistake

So hard to choose sides!

Re:UK promo was good

[DrogMan]

The promo was/is good and I was about to sign up to Google Checkout to accept smallish payments on a system I'm working on, but was really put off by the fact that Google insist on the person making the payment sign up to a Google account. PayPal dropped this a long time ago, and much as I dislike PayPal, at least now you have the choice to letting your clients make their own decision to signing up to PayPal, or not.

Once Google removes this restriction, I'll probably use them to accept small payments rather than use PayPal.

/DM/