Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Google Accidently Revealed As eBay Critic

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the that-was-some-other-search-site dept.

Xiroth writes "In what could cause an escalation of tensions between the two internet giants, an anonymous critique of eBay's upcoming move to accepting only PayPal as the payment method in Australia has accidently been revealed to have been submitted by Google thanks to PDF meta-tags."

3 of 259 comments (clear)

  1. PayPal requires caution by sjbe · · Score: 5, Informative

    And in any case, what's the big deal with using Paypal? Sure, I've heard the horror stories, but fortunately nothing like that has ever happened to me as a seller, so there ya go. Give it time and you'll experience some of the horrors first hand. The main problems with PayPal from the standpoint a seller is that their policies make it pretty easy for buyers to abuse you and PayPal is rather expensive as well. I've sold over 10,000 items on eBay and received most payments via PayPal. 99% of the time it works well even if it is overly pricey for the service provided - but PayPal's policies are heavily tilted towards favoring buyers and you should NEVER forget that.

    Eventually you'll run into someone who decides they don't like something and the magic words with PayPal are "not as described" - it doesn't matter how accurately you actually did describe it since PayPal does not check or even care. Anyone can return anything, regardless of your policy on returns and get a full refund - screwing you out of the shipping price in the process. (accepting returns is usually a good policy but not in all cases) Worse, sometimes the "buyer" will ship you a box with nothing in it (keeping the item) and PayPal will give them their money back as soon as they provide "proof" of shipping. As for PayPal's seller's "protection", it's nearly worthless and PayPal puts so many stipulations in that they can basically weasel out anytime they want to. (and believe me they do)

    PayPal wants to be a bank without being regulated like one. They also implement a lot of poorly thought out policies that could only be fair if they could/would inspect the merchandise - but they don't and never will. I don't have a problem with their service overall but it should be used with a strong dose of caveat emptor.
  2. Google has hated ebay for awhile.... by WGFCrafty · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's coming up on two years since the slashdot article announcing that Ebay bans Google checkout payments.

    I'd be pissed too if Ebay pretty much implied that shitty little companies like propay.com can handle high dollar business transactions better.

    Of course the lack of features or policies is probably not the reason at at all. Paypal is probably just scared of having it's market share shoot straight through the floor.

  3. Re:I can also produce a pdf with the same title by PIBM · · Score: 5, Informative

    Did you actually RTFA ? Google provided the governement with a document (original form is unknown, as the governement can save it as a doc, if you'd have seen the title you'd understand) and the 'watchdogs' made a pdf out of that document, which used the original government provided filename as the title.