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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?"
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 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?
> 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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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just visited this site hadn't heard of it til I saw your post. this sounds like a good site in general, but the large amount of bootleg computer software that I've already seen on the site such as the Microsoft Office 2007 blue edition found here http://www.ioffer.com/i/MS-Microsoft-Office-2007-Blue-Edition-Very-Rare-36496701 and the windows xp black edition found here http://www.ioffer.com/i/Windows-Xp-Pro-SP3-Black-Edition-2008--56542416 or even the Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 Preactivated http://www.ioffer.com/i/Windows-Vista-Ultimate-SP1-Preactivated-FREE-SHIP-43585521 sorry to break it to ya folks but all of these are hack jobs and not legitimate product from microsoft. I wonder how long until microsoft lowers the boom on ioffer for allowing these kinds of auctions to remain listed.
I do think that the buyer was fair to give you negative feedback.
He had just won the auction, and you said that you decided that you dont want to sell it after all.
Posting a auction requires you to accept a legal agreement which outlines that.
"The winner called me up, told me to piss up a rope, and left me negative feedback because he said he knows I can't do anything about it." Why are you complaining...it was a bad sell, hence the negative feedback. Try to see this from the buyers point of view, but still... with 177 good and 1 bad review most people will still buy items from you On subject, I've been on Ebay since 1998. I understand that strict rules are necessary on such a huge market but I've left ship a long time ago because I love the simplicity of smaller sites
But the consumers decided they wanted to keep them.
In those situations, negative feedback was the only recourse that a scammed seller had.
Er, what about a lawsuit?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
You should have sold what you listed.
It's people like you who do stupid things that give us sellers a bad name.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
You should have had negative feedback for cancelling the auction so close to the end. It was a negative experience for the bidders. It sounds like the winner might not have left negative feedback for you if he knew you could retaliate in kind, which suggests eBay's new rules are working perfectly.
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For once, I think the free market argument works here, why should anyone else other than eBay and their customers be involved?
It's not like eBay provide an essential service like water or electricity or something, if you don't want to buy/sell your stuff there, just don't use it.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
IANAL, but I have taken business law classes in the process. Your attorney doesnt understand contract law. Through the electronic agreement through ebay's terms of use, when you list something for sale, and do not cancel prior to the 12 hour rule, you have entered a binding contract to sell the listed item at the price of the winning bidder. The winning bidder has entered a binding contract to pay the amount of the winning bid should it be the winning bid, again, with the terms of ebay's electronic agreement. Not reading that agreement is no excuse, as it is made available to you and you have agreed to abide by it. Without ebay's legal agreement, you would be obligated to sell the car for the price of the winning bid, or to pay the difference in price that the winning bidder ended up paying after not being able to obtain it from you. If he had to pay $1 million more to obtain, you would pay him $1 million. If its a one of a kind collection, you could be court ordered to hand the car over or even pay the winning bid amount to keep the car Thank ebay that all you get is negative feedback, and many users will not bid on your remaining items. I find it hard to believe that you are selling items on ebay and not making sure you understand your rights as a seller beforehand. Shame on you for complaining that you and your lawyer dont understand what you have agreed to in your actions.
In those situations, negative feedback was the only recourse that a scammed seller had.
Wait, so eBay takes proof of shipment that you weren't scammed out of a diamond ring, and you feel that is 100% ok, as long as you can leave negative feedback? I think that the fact that they take shipment records as "proof" of contents of the package would be the issue, as opposed to negative feedback that was overwhelming used as blackmail. I guess blackmail was perfectly fine, as long as it gave you a chance to lash out at a loss eBay asserts you didn't suffer.
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