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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?"
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!
Well, the purpose of negative feedback is to stop being getting screwed over by bad actors.
There are several ways that a buyer can scam a seller. They can, for example, claim that the item is not as described, and then return something else (e.g. buying a new diamond ring and returning a cheap cubic zirconia, or buying a new laptop and returning an old one). eBay and PayPal will honour proof of postage as "proof" that the correct item was returned, even if it wasn't.
In those situations, negative feedback was the only recourse that a scammed seller had.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
For better or worse some sellers screwed the rest over. People started sending out emails saying that if for any reason you left a neutral or negative feedback they would leave negative feedback on you. It discouraged honesty from buyers. I myself ended up leaving a positive feedback with negative comment attached after buying a cell phone that had been misrepresented.