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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
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?
That doesn't work when the only option presented to users is paypal, the eBay system wont let you finalise auctions until PayPal processing has occurred and eBay start removing listings that don't conform.
And no, you didn't get first post you idiot.
> 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.
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"
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.
EBay is a medium to connect buyers and sellers, nothing more.
That's the mantra eBay has often chanted (usually in the context of somebody wanting to hold them responsible for some fraud that has been perpetrated), but the fact is that they have gradually done everything they can over the years to insert themselves between buyer and seller, and to be directly involved in every phase of the transaction. They have already previously tried to ban or at least discourage other forms of payment -- this is nothing new. They tried several years ago to force all sellers to complete transactions through eBay's own "Checkout" system, and only backed down after mass bitching by some very high volume sellers. They try to intimidate you into using only eBay's own on-site message system to contact bidders instead of e-mailing them directly.
The problem with these measures is, while still technically "optional," eBay does nothing to encourage such "rogue" behavior, and many (maybe most) users, both sellers and bidders, who have come aboard after these "options" were implemented are under the impression that they are mandatory because eBay pushes them constantly while burying the more seller-centric options in obscurity. Consequently, many bidders no longer understand the "eBay is only a venue" schtick, and believe that they are dealing directly with eBay. After all, when your messages all come through the eBay site, and you pay by clicking on buttons on the eBay site, you lose track of the fact that there are thousands of individual sellers who are the actual merchants. I've had problems with more than a few bidders who refuse to answer my e-mails or to pay me directly instead of through eBay's Checkout because they think it's not "official" otherwise, and that I am trying to pull some sort of scam on them.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
A - EBay is a medium to connect buyers and sellers, nothing more.
B - This was a non-issue from the start.
Dream on...
A - Ebay is a money making machine and de-facto monopoly on online auctions.
B - Ebay owns PayPal - their auction interfaces are strongly interlinked and incentives in PayPal "Buyer protection" are predominanty shown on every(?) auction.
Look at 10 auctions and count non-PayPal (quick - CC) payments accepted - I found NONE!
They can easily effort dropping enforcement of PayPal - they get it anyway.
Maybe it was dumb to try it in that manner.
EBay is a medium to connect buyers and sellers, nothing more.
EBay is a way of profiting from a sale without actually selling anyting.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
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
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.