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eBay To Disallow Checks and Money Orders In US
Sir_Kurt writes "In eBay's latest FAQ, they explain that sellers (for the good of the buyers) will no longer be allowed to accept checks or money orders as payment. They can take electronic payments only. So, will Google Checkout, Checkout by Amazon or Amazon Flexible Payment be allowed? No, says eBay: 'Google's and Amazon's products and services compete with eBay on a number of levels, so we are not going to allow them on eBay.' Options are limited to PayPal, ProPay, direct credit payments to the seller, and 'payment upon pickup.' But remember, this is for our own good!"
eBay ran into trouble earlier this year for trying to restrict payment options.
That doesn't excuse banning competing payment systems, however, especially ones that meet the same standard as Paypal.
This is a sideways move towards allowing only Paypal transactions to be made in the US - they're testing the water and seeing how far they can push it.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
If Google wanted, they could launch an e-bay competitor.
God spoke to me.
I don't mind using PayPal, but I really hate the fact that the site is swamped with commercial vendors rather than people selling stuff they don't need any more. eBay needs to be split into a marketplace where you can go to buy new things (like Amazon), and the good old auctioning of used personal stuff. Until they do that, they won't see me again.
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
I'm with you, man. Every few months I decide to scour eBay for something I don't want to pay full price for with the hope that I'll find the one true, used, item from a normal person in the middle of all of the "new for the same price or more than it costs at a store, plus shipping, plus you have to wait for it to arrive" crap.
Every time I do that, I end up spending the next hour ranting to my wife (seriously, for real, I have one of those) about how eBay has gone to hell and it's just a bunch of overpriced, new products now instead of used stuff.
But there really aren't a lot of "somewhere elses", other than craigslist, at least, not in a realistic sense. And craigslist is only an okay option for people who are happy selling locally at a fixed price (or perhaps "best offer", if you want to be technical about it.)
Other than that... hmm. Certainly there are a whole myriad of tiny itty-bitty auction sites out there (I would guess), but aside for some very narrow specialty niches, ebay enjoys an incredible barrier-to-entry advantage in the auction-house market. Why? Because when selling, just about everybody wants the biggest possible market for their wares. Hence, just about everybody goes to the biggest market. Duh.
This will not change until/unless eBay shoots itself in the foot by getting so greedy on sales commissions that they manage to piss off a critical mass of people. And even then, they'll still enjoy enough of a natural advantage that they can just back off a percentage point, wipe out their fledgling upstart competitor, and carry on as before.
Listen to what I say, not what I mean...
Quotes like this make it sound as if Paypal had a standard. Instant transfers and protection from fraud on ebay sound great, but there are also many cases in which money gets retransferred for no apparent reason or accounts are blocked because something was not conforming to their "policy". To me they are just pretending to be a real bank. As long as it works as advertised it is great but when there is trouble you'll face scenarios you would never encounter with any financial institute.
I'm too tired to look up any sources, but take a look at this google search.
I don't read replies by ACs.
Now you can truly get scammed!
Previously, the best way to pay was with a US Post Office money order.
What you would do is write a description of the item that you had purchased, and if you didn't get it, the seller had committed mail fraud.
The reason this was the best, is that they (the post office)have a whole division dedicated to mail fraud, and would actually work at tracking down fraudsters and shutting down their operations, as the laws on mail fraud have teeth, as opposed to something that belongs in small claims court otherwise.
Other payment methods (Visa, MC, PayPal) isn't going to spend a whole lot of effort to recover minor amounts of money, they may refund your money, but the scammer gets to continue their operation, maybe with a minor name change, taking advantage of the next sucker to come along.
This goes back to the reason why you don't really want to hack government entities, is that they will spend a fortune on tracking down the perpetrator all out of disproportion to the actual damage caused. *
In fact, a good way to tell the legitimacy of the seller, especially if they were a "private" seller, is to see if they would accept a USPO money order.
If they didn't it was a red flag that you may not want to deal with them.
I can understand (from a purely greed standpoint) of EBay not wanting to allow this type of transaction, as they don't get even more of a cut of the PayPal action, and just have to make due with the listing fee.
Oh well, just another nail in the coffin for fiscal responsibility.
You're quite correct apart from one thing. eBay has been trying to bump its stock price for the past 3 years -- totally unsuccessfully. It's almost half of what is was 3 years ago(prior to the Skype purchase debacle). It's a dead man walking, and has been for some considerable time. Meg Whitman, the prime architect of its demise, baled a rich woman some time back. Just in time to avoid be caught in the wake of the ship as it sinks.
I'm sure they did it for our benefit. Collecting 30 days of interest on hundreds of thousands of dollars probably doesn't factor into it at all.
This is what EBAY wants. They want to get rid of the casual sellers(higher fees, forcing them to adopt one type of payment..etc) and only have commercial sales. They make way more money doing this. Of course this means that they are stabbing in the back, the seller base that made EBAY what it is. What we need is a NEW auction site to take away ebays crown.
I suggest, instead of calling your legislators to ask them for more laws and restrictions, I suggest that you use your freedom of choice, and stop doing business with PayPal.
Because the next time you ask a legislator to regulate something you don't like, they may end up regulating something you DO like.
The heavy hand of government should be the absolute last resort.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Refraining from doing business with PayPal is not an option. There is in many cases no good alternative.
PayPal also doesn't care if I personally or even if I get 1000 people to join me in refraining from using them; it won't change a thing. There won't be a massive boycott of PayPal; only a small number of people have been directly impacted by PayPal's bad practices, not enough to create the necessary outrage.
People have tried personally boycotting PayPal for a long time -- this isn't a good answer either, these people are personally harmed by not having use of PayPal's services.
And PayPal doesn't care. The only thing corporations as huge as PayPal do understand is regulation.
The regulations don't need to tell PayPal how to blow their nose, but they need to tell them not to blow it in my face.
They need to be restrained from arbitrarily freezing individual customers accounts and holding cash that rightfully belongs to the customers for extended periods of time.
Amounts frozen for more than X days need be limited to transactions that there is specific and reported cause for suspicion about.
Amounts frozen for more than Y days need to be limited to transactions that have an issue. And X
They should be prohibited from discriminating: no closing of an account without cause and without warning. And no stealing: no closing an account and refusing to release assets for 6 months, without a judge's order to do so.