eBay Australia Makes PayPal Processing Mandatory

Just recently eBay UK made a change to their policy where all sellers must accept PayPal payment along side any other payment seller wishes to accept. This time eBay Australia went one step further. For eBay Australia, PayPal has to be the only accept form of payment with the exception of local pickup. Here is an AuctionByte article on this new policy.

I thought preventing the use of Google Checkout was bad but this sort of draconian policy just takes the cake. I guess eBay sees sellers who accept checks, money orders, or do their own credit card processing are nothing more than sellers trying to circumvent PayPal fees.  It’s only matter of time for this sort of onerous policy to be implemented in the US. Anyone want to make a wager on when this will happen here?  I guess those Australian eBay sellers who are on the fence about boycotting eBay just got some new motivation to join the global boycott.

Smell of Desperation

I get the feeling that eBay is acting bit desperate to get the listing numbers up. eBay is now trying to lure back sellers no longer selling with $10 listing fee credit.

eBay clearly knows the current state of eBay isn’t looking so good. Every indication is that most sellers’ sales numbers are way down. There is almost a perfect storm of three things are work right now. The economy is in or in a verge of a recession right now. The oil price has hit $112 a barrel today. Also this is the tax season so it’s not exactly happy time for spending money. On top of that eBay is suffering from the self inflicted wound known as the Best Match. Both seller and buyers agree that the new search engine is a complete disaster. Buyers are frustrated because they can’t find anything they’re looking for and sellers are even more frustrated because their sales numbers have plummeted. The third is the boycott. Ever since the announcement of the changes many have stopped buying or selling and even those that are still selling have scaled back considerably. The sellers that have returned selling after the first boycott ended are now using eBay to get buyers to an alternate venue.

eBay has recently started burying threads on Seller Central discussion group that talks about the upcoming boycott. That’s not too surprising but what they have started doing is going bit farther than normal. They’ve started cracking down on threads that discussed the burying of boycott thread as well as other loosely boycott related topics. They’ve also started deleting comments that are vaguely negative about eBay’s policies. eBay’s discussion group moderators are definitely more aggressive in curbing negative speech at this time and it’s likely to get even tighter as May 1st boycott approaches.