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EBay Abandons Plans For PayPal Monopoly
An anonymous reader writes "eBay's has lost its fight to ban all payment methods except PayPal.
When Paypal originally announced the scheme it was to be global,
but they began with a dry run in Australia to test the reaction of government and consumer authorities.
In the public slanging match that followed between eBay and the regulatory ACCC, eBay spammed users claiming it was fighting for 'safety benefits for consumers.' Fortunately the consumers won.
Conceded eBay vice president Simon Smith, 'While we disagree with the ACCC's draft notice, we have decided to withdraw the notification to stop any further confusion and disruption among the eBay community.'
Nevertheless eBay insists PayPal is now always offered as a payment option.
Have big corporations finally learned that they can go too far? More chillingly, if eBay had launched the scheme in America would they have gotten away with it?"
Then I would leave e-bay, after being there since 1996
EBay is a medium to connect buyers and sellers, nothing more. They can't regulate the actual terms of a transaction. All the parties have to do is accept "cash/check" as the method of payment and then go to Google/Western Union/whathaveyou and send the payment that way. Seller gets money via "unapproved" method. What's eBay going to do? Stop him from shipping the item?
This was a non-issue from the start.
fp?
More chillingly, if eBay had launched the scheme in America would they have got away with it?
Yes:P There aren't any wildly accepted payment processors you can go with with ebay. While I don't like the arbitrary way Paypal handles accounts, its hard for me to go back to mailing a check or money order with its convenience. I doubt enough Americans would care one way or the other sadly.
I quit eBay (Canada) the day that they forced Canadian sellers to accept Paypal. Also, the fact that they'll withhold payments to me for 21 days without paying interest didn't go over so well either.
Shame to let all that good feedback go but I won't bend over for corporate raping.
I applaude the ACCC on this move but I wish somebody would have told me this was going to happen sooner. I requested them to shut down my eBay account in protest a month ago. eBay rationalized this by saying they were acting in the interests of consumers despite consumers said very clear they were against this.
This was about monopoly and eBay getting paid twice per transaction (more money for them). They spammed me MANY times trying to say "this is for your own good". I had customer representatives hassling me all the time when I requested my account be closed and they were going "you can sign up to paypal" and I said "I dont want a paypal account" and after 5 repeated attempts, they still havent shut it down but say "its in the process of being shut down"
Make SELinux enforcing again!
I understand that the real aversion to this plan comes from the "mandatory" part, but why is PayPal a bad thing? Personally, I like having a middleman shield my credit card information from the seller, and I like some of the other protections that using PayPal can afford.
And, frankly, what's so wrong about having a specific method of payment used throughout a website? If eBay had their own internal payment system identical in every way to PayPal, would there be as much fervor?
I wish they did do it, so that Google could finally put up Google Auctions and we finally got rid of eBay.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
> More chillingly, if eBay had launched the scheme in America would they have got away
> with it?
Probably, because while people like you would have whined and moaned about the evil of it all you would have kept right on doing business with them. You recite high-sounding phrases about your rights, but you value convenience more.
Try to get a grip. There are lots of other ways to buy and sell things. If Ebay management wants to act like a pack of fools it's between them and their shareholders. They need customers more than the customers need them.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Why is there no competing online fleamarket to eBay? We all know eBay sucks ass! I want my competition!
Yes, yes, I know, build it and they will come...
The outright banning was perhaps a red-herring, i.e. an "It can be worse" program to distract people from other anti-competitive measures they were taking at the same time.
People will remember only that they were considering to ban the competitors outright, they have withdrawn that. Hence, they have succeeded. The public (the news media) will now ignore the more important changes -- the new requirement that paypal be offered on all listings.
Think of the auction bidding strategy that involves conspiracy: the highest bidder will confer with a third party to "accidentally" make an obvious bidding error, like bidding 100000 on a $100 item. The high-bidding conspirator will withdraw their bid (based on it being an obvious error), with the second-highest bidder getting the item for a ridiculously low price.
Banning non-paypal services outright is the distracting (erroneous bid). Making it mandatory to offer a Paypal option on all listings is the lower bid that still gets the item (eBay merchants' payment processing business).
They've also basically gotten away with it by banning their potential biggest competitor (Google) early.
Justifications are only to save face. The real reason they want to ban new non-Paypal services should be obvious.
By having pay-by-PayPal-through-eBay's-site required to be an option for all actions, the other payment methods will begin to be marginalized.
Because they will be less convenient.
By "not banning them" eBay will pretend to be placating them and allowing competition, where in fact, it will be harder for competitors to compete than before.
Now by withdrawing their "ban on alternate payment services", many people have by now forgotten or won't notice other changes...
They'll think eBay learned their lesson and will play nice, when it couldn't be farther from the truth.
do they know the appropriate congressman to make a contribution to?
if so, it would have sailed through with no objections from the ftc.
if not? it would have been questioned (but would have passed as soon as congress realized that ebay is a business and their management/shareholders have money available to give to re-election campaigns).
This space intentionally left blank
Australian law lays between the consumer-driven EU laws and the company driven-US laws.
The ACCC is an independent government body specifically designed to prevent US-style corporate bastardisation. It's significantly resistant to US-style lobbying and has the power to stop company mergers, monitor and investigate pricing, regulate telecommunications companies, make unfair company policies illegal to enforce and works via a complaint system. (Meaning that individuals have the power to enact a government body to look into unreasonable practices.)
The ACCC is the reason why the iPhone is available on all competent Australian telecoms, why banks had to pass on savings to consumers and why ebay couldn't impose their paypal policy.
The smaller nature of the Australian population allows for this kind of organisation to exist, so I'm not confident this would scale without corruption to larger countries.(There is also an organisation which deals specifically with corruption.)
As with any system, there is an appeals process, many companies don't take this route (such as ebay) as the ACCC are usually just enforcing the existing fair trading & trade practices laws.
It feels great to be an Australian.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
I stopped using Paypal after an error the part of their site caused a payment to a seller to be issued twice. While they are heavily tied in to eBay (the auction numbers each payment is linked to are available in one's payment history) they apparently have no mechanism to prevent double-payments. Both payments were deducted from my credit card immediately, but the seller was kind enough to quickly refund the duplicate payment. However, I learned via a PayPal email that "Refunds to credit cards may take up to 30 days for processing", or something to that effect. I was finally issued the refund on July 2. I assume the reason that refunds are not issued in a timely manner has nothing to do with processing, but has more to do with keeping your money, whether gained legitimately or not, in their accounts earning interest until the month rolls over.
Here in the good 'ole capitalist USA (not to say that's a bad thing) we don't punish Corps. for actions like this anymore. If that is what you have to do to make a buck then go for it. I think the best example to date is AT&T's immunity from any and all lawsuits during the wireprobing debacle. Free Market was a bad idea...it should have been Fair Market (in the sense that you should be fair to your consumers).
"More chillingly, if eBay had launched the scheme in America would they have got away with it?"
Depends on whether they bribed enough of the right people or not. Simple and obvious to anyone with knowledge of our system.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
Now we must bring this case to America so we can use Google Checkout over Paypal.
\
What's the bid deal if they won?
They only accept Paypal, I stop buying at Ebay, other companies that don't limit me get big.
Why can't we just let a bad idea kill a company?
- Have big corporations finally learned that they can go to far?
Where is this place called 'far'? I would like to get two tickets if its not too expensive.
No. They are regrouping and working on purchasing corrupt officials as we speak. Their war against consumer-citizens continues on.
More chillingly, if eBay had launched the scheme in America would they have got away with it?
GWB. Iraq. Healthcare..... Most assuredly.
If I run a grocery store, I'm allowed to say what kinds of checks I'll take.
If I run a coffee shop, I get to decide who'se posters stay on the bulletin board.
If I run an actual, physical auction house, I'm allowed to say "all payments run through the house." In fact that's what all physical auction houses DO say.
There's nothing "free as in speech" about a service like eBay. It's a commercial enterprise. They could demand payment in chickens and the ONLY right anyone has is to simply say no and not use them.
The summary should read "... go too far ...." That's primary-school stuff.
Put identity in the browser.
You know, all jokes aside about certain politicans who think the unemployment stats aren't that bad because those people are just making a living selling comic books online . . . the online swap meet is just too big a part of the economy to be trusted to people as incompetent as Ebay.
If you are a general jack-of-all-trades "computer guy" for a small company, like I am, then you know there are numerous projects that you could just have not done if you had not been able to obtain something rare or cheap on ebay. If you are in any sort of small industry, from light manufacturing to agricultural to construction, then you know that the ability to dispose of un-needed equipment at decent price on ebay gives you key financial flexibility. Probably the only areas were ebay has competition are in chemical supply from ChemNet and in automobiles on craigslist.
I think there is little chance that someone can design a distributed, gnutella like auction system. You need a third party, the auctioneer, to verify when bids came in, and check for shill bidding.
I think we need to form a consortium, kind of like a farmer's coop or a credit union. You would buy a membership that would be one share; big sellers would not be able to dominate by buying more than one share, it would be one share per person. You would need a share to buy as well as sell. The co-op would operate the web site, and spend some of the fees to randomly buy products and check the sellers for fraud, and then randomly re-sell those products and check the sellers for fraud. The buy-in fee would have to be kind of steep to deter people from getting multiple accounts, but we could let those without financial resources work it off by volunteering on the hunt-down/beat-down commitee for fraudsters.
Because, when you buy a share you would sign away your right not to have the shit beaten out of you for stealing money, kind of how someone who cannot afford their own bail signs away their right not to be kidnapped to a bondsman, who can re-sell that priviledge to a bounty hunter. In fact, I would nominate that Dog dude in Hawaii as one of our first hires.
What do you guys think ? I think if we could get 1,000 people to sign up for an initial share for 100 dollars, that would be 100,000 dollars, and you can launch any business on the internet for that much money. We could adjust the signup fee later.
I have earned my entire (significant) income selling IT infrastructure and biopharma research equipment on ebay for years. All the changes they have made in the past 6 months have utterly killed my business. I went from supporting my family and many people that worked for me to ruin. They have completely killed ability of small people to compete (in my arena, at least.) I'm a lucky one because I just landed a kick-ass job doing what I actually like to do (consulting and IT) - but I know several others who are not so lucky. People that are about to lose everything, and who didn't have a high-paying skill to fall back on. This might be a bit off-topic so far, so I'll add in something that is on topic: this paypal only thing really probably wouldn't have made much more for paypal. Speaking from my focus (IT and Scientific equipment) virtually all transactions are paid by paypal anyway. We accept credit cards, wire, checks, Hell- on many items I;d take *anything* as payment (I'd even take an old HP-3000 or Vax!) The thing is, everyone has any payment choice they desire with us, and out of every $100 well over $99 comes through paypal. In fact, if we were rounding properly to integer values, $100 our of $100 comes through Paypal. So, if my focus holds true for other types of sales on ebay, the security thing might actually have been true in this case. Now, all that said, "Ebay, I hope you die a quick but painful death...the same you inflicted on me and so many others who worked our guts out to build a business on your platform. Die, you bastards."
I only use PayPal and will not deal with any seller/buyer that does not accept PayPal. I don't trust 'the check is in the mail', or 'I will wire the money to you tomorrow'. I am especially wary of sellers that offer me a discount if I pay them direct to avoid additional fees. By using PayPal, every step of the transaction is recorded and logged for reference.
The one time I was warned that a seller had been removed from eBay due to suspicious sales -- and I had already completed the sale -- I filed with eBay and PayPal. I got nearly all of my money back. The seller had gotten to his bank account and removed some of the money first.
Don't like the fees? Then charge more for your auction or go to another auction site.
Bearded Dragon
This will make people safer, and those who are getting scammed if using paypal will get their money back. This does make people safer.
OTOH if you allow others to use your machine, please do periodically wipe it with clorox wipes or one of the many other disinfecting wipes. They also help get that crap off the keys too. Get a screw driver to wedge it down in between and remember keys do pop off as well. Just be firm but gentle. They pop right back on again.
While I haven't done it myself, I understand you can even put them in the dish washer. Just make sure it is dry before plugging it in again. I do know this won't work with the SUN capacitive keyboards. This also won't fix a keyboard that Coke has been spilled into. At least with the keyboards around 20+ years ago.
Why the hell has the Government got to anything do with this? If eBay customers don't want to use eBay because they're mandating PayPal, they have the right to go elsewhere.
It's a sad day for liberty when the customers of a company get to use force to determine the policies of that company.
I only use PayPal and will not deal with any seller/buyer that does not accept PayPal. I don't trust 'the check is in the mail', or 'I will wire the money to you tomorrow'. I am especially wary of sellers that offer me a discount if I pay them direct to avoid additional fees. By using PayPal, every step of the transaction is recorded and logged for reference.
The one time I was warned that a seller had been removed from eBay due to suspicious sales -- and I had already completed the sale -- I filed with eBay and PayPal. I got nearly all of my money back. The seller had gotten to his bank account and removed some of the money first.
Don't like the fees? Then charge more for your auction or go to another auction site.
I'm sorry to say paypal doesn't protect you from scammers. Read the fine print. Trust me, i was defrauded for 500 bucks by a seller who had 1000 positive feedback ratio (all VERY well astroturfed).
The truth is any service which allows you to use a major credit card will allow you to recover defrauded funds by disputing the charge. Don't make the mistake of thinking PayPal or some other service of its sort actually gives a damn, use your credit card's dispute service like I have since that time (recovering a further 1500).
This said, Ebay is on its last legs, at least when it comes to electronics. At least 30% of its listings are hong kong or nigerian scammers running hijacked accounts saying "e-mail me for 'buy it now' price!".
I really do feel for the legit sellers who are left. I honestly think Ebay drove off enough of their peers to make the online auction scene incredibly seedy.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
and no i can't give out the website address because she won't tell me (she knows i'd do something like post it on /. muahaha)
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Not all Australians are champions of mixed economies you know. Some of us like our capitalism neat.
According to the paper today they're still insisting on PayPal, despite what they've publicly said to the contrary.
They spammed this to all Australian users. They must think we're really stupid to swallow this corporate propaganda:
(attached)
--
WHY ARE THESE CHANGES HAPPENING?
The decision to delay these changes was made by eBay following the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's (ACCC) draft notice issued on Thursday 12 June 2008.
eBay released a media statement on Friday 13 June regarding the ACCC's draft notice.
The statement reads as follows:
ACCC draft notice undermines online consumer protection
eBay will continue to fight for safety benefits for consumers
13 June 2008: eBay challenges yesterday's Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's (ACCC) draft notice and is disappointed that the ACCC's current view delays the opportunity to provide consumers a more secure way to shop on eBay.com.au with confidence.
eBay intends to work with the ACCC and hopes to achieve a final outcome which has the safety and security of eBay's members as its paramount objective. eBay will delay the removal of other payment methods from the site until Tuesday 15 July.
PayPal offers consumers a range of payment choices, including bank transfer and credit cards. It's a safer and easier online payment system that significantly enhances protection for eBay buyers and sellers.
eBay is pleased to confirm that PayPal buyer protection will jump to $20,000 on eBay.com.au for purchases paid for using PayPal from Tuesday 17 June.
eBay believes the consumer benefits of this initiative are worth fighting for on behalf of its buyers which will ultimately benefit sellers.
Regards
The eBay team
This email was sent from eBay International AG in accordance with the eBay user agreement.
--
BTW The $20,000 PayPal protection sounds nice but I was once a victim of an eBay scam (reputable seller turned rogue, took the money and ran). This hit all his customers but despite paying by PayPal and thinking this was safe, turned out the protection didn't apply.
But it didn't save you from price gouging ISP's giving you crap for service, then metering it on top of that.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
This EFA (similar to the EFF) quote from the article (RTFA!) summed it up nicely:
However, eBay has refused to roll back the first stage of its proposed changes, which required all sellers to at least offer PayPal as one of the payment options.
"Forcing sellers to accept PayPal payments will harm competition by making it more difficult for PayPal's competitors to compete," said Dale Clapperton, chair of the online users lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia.
"eBay should allow sellers the choice of whether or not to deal with PayPal. Many sellers choose not to use PayPal because of higher fees or past bad experiences. "If PayPal is truly the best payment option, why does eBay need to force people to do business with them?"
I am a European eBay buyer. From the posts in this thread, this seems to put me in a firm minority on Slahsdot. Anyway; I much prefer PayPal to bank transfer because in case of fraudolent, forged or non working product (or simply if the item was never sent), I have an avenue for recourse. With wire transfers I have no way to recover my money.
Also, in case of overseas payments, PayPal is _way_ cheaper than wire transfer.
Just my 2 cents (or a Euro). Resume your cheering.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
RTFA. They were going to ban other payment methods *except* PayPal. They got as far as demanding sellers accept PayPal payments, but the backdown means everyone still has the option of paying by other means.
BTW Someone above suggested maybe this was eBays idea all along? They back down, but they get a really nice runners-up prize... :-/
^^ see above.
I didn't think I'd ever see a site that offered even fewer legitimate watches for sale than eBay.
If you haven't learned anything over the past 10 years. Big business can do just about anything.
eBay can do whatever they want, It's not ebays fault you get scammed on ebay when you don't use paypal. Now people have lost there one stop shop of money transfers and single method of fraud. So instead of have a single person responsible for the cash (aka paypal), scammers, phishers and dead beats can continue to play there games outside ebay.
Oh and feedback, what a joke, feedback user accounts are based on bank account numbers or credit card numbers, guess what, its free to get a new one, just ask your bank to change it, BAM, new account, scamming again, weeeeeee..
GG consumers
For instance it is reported from the article that "Sellers are reporting that eBay is systematically deleting auction listings from sellers who state in their item descriptions that they "prefer" to be paid with non-PayPal methods, such as bank deposit."
This sordid story is not over and us Aussies can be 'Real Right Bastards' when we are not given a fair go.
The more I know, the less I know
and only then did we win.
Hackers have long memories. It works both ways.
But the consumers decided they wanted to keep them.
To be more precise: the NSU Prinz was a German car. No Italian design in it.
In Italy it had a reputation of bringing bad luck, too.
...were his last words before the box jellyfish, funnel spiders, Tasmanian devils, great whites, and inland taipans overtook him.
I posted an MP3 player for sale. I was told I must offer PayPal and ONLY PayPal.
See here for screen grab:
http://www.itwriting.com/blog/708-ebay-insisting-on-paypal-only-in-the-uk.html
Tim
Paypal tried to use the rohypnol!
how it is usefull when they froze your account or simply you go over the maximum income limit?
you really want to pay that fees?
as seller you dont risk anything than negative rating. i dont accept returns.
as buyer i buy only what i can pickup personally
This is about the sellers still being forced to accept Paypal:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/web/ebay-still-forcing-sellers-to-use-paypal/2008/07/04/1214951011001.html
It notes "eBay spokesman Daniel Feiler denied the site was strong-arming users into using PayPal. ... Feiler would not comment on individual circumstances but did not deny that eBay was contacting buyers advising them not to deal with sellers who state in their description they prefer being paid through bank deposit."
Sounds dubious...
So how have they "lost their fight"? They're still forcing people to register with PayPal, and they seem to get away with that.
I live in Europe where PayPal isn't mandatory yet. I do all my Ebay transactions through bank transfer. The day they force me to use untrustworthy payment methods like credit cards or PayPal will be my last day on Ebay.
On first looks it looks horrible with fake offers to make discussions about products or offers (e.g. http://www.ioffer.com/i/iphone-3G-Scam-Please-Read--59937406 ) This is somehow even worse than ebay.
Why can't there be a good market site out there? It can't be that hard for a major player.
"to" vs "too".
OP here. Yes, I know that. Typo. It happens. However spelling "chillingly" must more than compensate. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go too the bathroom. Oh damn.
Wow, what a creepy stalker you are. Posting anonymous for obvious reasons... :)
Someone tell me how eBay spammed!
Lets make a rule "NO FUCKTARDS!!
Why would sellers move to somewhere with no buyers? Why would buyers move to somewhere with no sellers?
You'd have to persuade an enormous amount of ebay's user base to move, which I imagine would be quite a challenge.
Your bitchfest is no different from people who whine and moan because Google changed their PageRank algorithm and dropped them from the number-one search result to Page 5. If the success of your business depends on the particular method by which another company does business, you'd better have a backup plan -- because that company doesn't owe you a livelihood.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
The one that bothers me is the intense work they go through to force people to pay by bank account rather than credit card. If I get scammed by credit card, I can cut off the charges. Not so with a bank, once that money leaves it's gone.
Can you explain the use of negative feedback against buyers?
The long and short of it is that sometimes sellers deserve negative feedback and sometimes buyers deserve negative feedback. There are plenty of good reasons in each case.
It seems that if they didn't pay that would be an issue you would take to Ebay, not something you'd complain about on their feedback page.
You can run through the non-paying bidder process but it has no teeth unless the buyer is a multiple time offender. eBay does not and (apparently) cannot make buyers pay - they only can kick them off eBay. Being able to tell other sellers about a problem buyer is one of the few defenses sellers have to recognize when a buyer is likely to be a problem. If a buyer has a history of negative feedback sellers sometimes can protect themselves. After all, if you are dealing with a known problem customer it should be my right as a seller not to deal with them.
It discouraged honesty from buyers.
Honesty from buyers? My guess is you haven't sold a significant amount of stuff on eBay. I have over 10,000 feedbacks with a 99.7% positive rating and have seen just about every buyer scam in the book first hand. I'm an optimistic person by nature but when you've had people try to burn you as much as I have you cease being so optimistic about the "honesty from buyers". Most buyers are fine but a very significant percentage are not and making it impossible for sellers to respond to the bad ones does not help anyone.
The vast majority of feedbacks are either content free ("A+++++ BEST SELLER EVER!!!!") or simply rude responses from people who couldn't be bothered to resolve a problem civilly. I particularly love getting negative feedback from buyers who can't be bothered to actually read the auction terms. Happens ALL the time.
While I'll be the first to admit there are a lot of scummy sellers out there there are at least as many scummy buyers. eBay's change in policy is an attempt to assure buyers that eBay is safe (it isn't) so that they don't take their business elsewhere.
I signed up on ebay about a month ago. after a few purchases the website told me I had reached a limit I could spend on ebay without associating my bank account to it or taking one of their credit cards.
Being scared to give any 3rd part company direct access to my bank account I was obliged to sign up for one of their credit cards if I wanted to continue using ebay.
I have two other credit cards assciated with paypal already but now I have the paypal card too, much of the time it won't let me pay for stuff other than with their credit card only. I've spent several hours on the phone to paypal over several calls, but they just keep saying they have a "sceurity detector" in their computer that sees something fishy about most transactions not made with my paypal credit card so limits my payment options for safety reasons, which is total crap. Most of the time I'm buying from people with very high reputations or power sellers etc. Furthermore they claim they can't override it.
I went to make a purchase of an item thats in the UK. Even though I had my UK caredit card associated with paypal already, even for a UK purchase so I ended up having to pay using their card only, meaning I had to do a redundant currency conversion and also accept their lousy conversion rate.
Actually I'm just about to cancel my paypal plus credit card just to not allow paypal to have it as an option to force me to pay with any more, so hopefully the system will then have to allow me to use my other cards.
My real name is a very common English name.
No sig today...
You think a diamond thief cares about a bit of negative feedback?
Scammers will have a new account up and running within hours.
No sig today...
Well, why don't a group of us get together and make something better... Making a better site is the easy part tho, letting people know about it is the really hard part. An auction site without many listings won't attract buyers, and one without many buyers won't attract sellers.
Amazon.com and Yahoo already tried and failed miserably to make competing auction sites. If they failed with all their IT talent and capital the odds of anyone else succeeding are pretty slim. Network effects keep eBay as a de-facto monopoly. Buyers go where the sellers are and vice versa even if the marketplace (eBay) is less than ideal.
The only company I could possibly see making a dent in eBay would be Google but that would be a long shot and I doubt they really want the business. I think eBay is going to have a lot of liability issues due to all the fraud and fake/stolen merchandise.
Why is there no competing online fleamarket to eBay?
Network effects plain and simple. Buyers go where the sellers are and sellers go where the buyers are.
I can sympathize with you. You are correct that I haven't sold much. Actually I only have 7 feedback and only one of those was something I sold. It's for that very reason that I didn't need the hassle of getting a negative feedback. 1 out of 7 would have looked pretty bad I thought. As near as I can figure from their actions and descriptions in various forums over the years EBay doesn't care about sellers. They don't. They care about buyers. This seems backwards doesn't it? Don't all their fees come from the seller side? But then again when they have virtually every buyer then the sellers won't have much choice about where to sell.
if eBay had launched the scheme in America would they have gotten away with it?
Clearly they didn't feel very confident about it. Why do you think they tested it in Australia?
If they tried it in America and it scared off all their buyers, they would destroy their business. If the American buyers went to another site, the sellers all over the world would follow right behind them. However, any Australians that abandoned ebay as a result of the policy will eventually come back. The Australian market is not big enough to poach ebay's sellers. Even if they alienated every customer in Australia they'd still be the #1 auction site. A small, isolated market like Australia is the best place for them to test a policy they aren't sure about.
EBay convinces Bush goverment that other payment systems are a security risk... clause added to DMCA... anything can happen :)
Fact is that now are sellers the one taking their business elsewhere. I moved to iOffer.com and so have hundreds of other sellers if you read the posts on ebay's forum.