eBay Bans Google Payments 591
whoever57 writes "eBay has added Google Checkout to the list of payment options banned on eBay. A recent update to the Accepted Payments Policy includes Google Checkout (click on 'Show' next to 'Some Examples' to reveal the list).
More comments on this action can be found at the eBay Strategies Blog."
Oh! Can I Please Be the First?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
I want to be the first to predict Google sues eBay for monopolistic practices or some other restriction on open and fair trade! <8^) This is just begging those two extremely rich guys up Highway 101 to see who has the best lawyers and legs to stand on. Honestly, IANAL, but I don't see it as within the rights of eBay to dictate how people accomplish the financial transactions for Rearranging the World's Junk, as they are merely the facilitators.
I also predict Google will win, but eBay will try to make it as clunky as possible.
There's just something about the culture within eBay which is visible to outside world, that these people are real dorks when it comes to business, but like Microsoft, were in the right place at the right time, which seems to go a very long way in business and the public forgiving leaders for bad practices.
And that wouldn't have anything at all to do with PayPal being a property of eBay [wikipedia.org] and further lining their pockets. ;-)
What next, coining their own money and then claiming payments can only be made with their own eBucks? I think the US Federal Reserve would have a thing or two to say about that.
Then again, this could be a push to more people offering their stuff on Craig's List [craigslist.org]. I wonder if eBay's 25% interest in that would be leveraged to interfer.
I like ebay less and less. (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, there isn't a good alternative yet.
How can they do that? (Score:2, Insightful)
This is good. (Score:5, Insightful)
This shows that eBay fears Google's new service. Ebay is starting to show its age and lack of innovation. It needs competition from the likes of Google and anyone else that can challenge them. I stopped using eBay due to the high fees. Good luck Google and I hope you bring a good fight!
http://religiousfreaks.com/ [religiousfreaks.com]Re:Say hello to my little antitrust lawsuit! (Score:5, Insightful)
The list of unapproved money exchanges includes a lot of services including Western Union, so the hue and cry about antitrust and "eBay only allows their own stuff" is nothing more than a bunch of smoke without a fire. eBay specifically states that any "new" service without a track record of privacy protection and customer service will be scrutinized and most likely prohibited until it has some history.
Everyone's quick to bitch and whine about eBay not going after fraud, not going after bad sellers, not backing them up on financial transactions and the like yet when eBay DOES try and show some spine and protection everyone piles on. It has less to do with the "paypal competition" than it does with "we have no idea how stable, how reliable and how safe this service is and we're saying no until such time as it does appear to be safe, private and protected"
Pick a direction to go, guys... do you want eBay to get the hell completely out of your way and act like nothing more than a broker and middleman or do you want them to try and put stuff in place to protect people because you can't have it both ways.
-- Gary F.
Re:Oh! Can I Please Be the First?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Ebay isn't an auction site.
and
2) Paypal isn't a bank.
This gets them around a lot of nasty local and national laws involving auctions and banks.
If it's concern for the customer. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
In other news (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:monopoly? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How can they do that? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not like eBay is some natural resource that we all share. It's not a government service, it's a for-profit company that always tells you what the terms of using their service will be, and you agree to them if you want to use the service. Is it smart, from a marketing and PR point of view? Open for debate. Is it reasonable for them to want you to use their own service (PayPal is part of eBay) when making use of their other service? Sure. Is it legal to say that participating in an eBay auction means doing so according their rules? Of course - because there are all sorts of other auction sites, if you'd rather go elsewhere.
Re:Say hello to my little antitrust lawsuit! (Score:5, Insightful)
I had to check for myself after reading the above to verify that the inclusion of Canadian Tire Money in that list wasn't a joke. It really is there!
Few Canadians would accept CT$ as a form of payment. Many would consider an attempt to do so to be a goofy joke, or worse. Yet eBay won't accept GooglePay, or even more established providers like Neteller. Hmmm...
(Note for those who don't know: Canadian Tire is a chain of hardware-turned-department stores whose gimmick is that they provide currency-like coupons as cashback on purchases.)
Re:Auction sights need buyers & sellers (Score:3, Insightful)
yeah, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:But, but...Master Card/Visa (Score:5, Insightful)
It has a monopoly on auctions.
Except for some specific niche markets, eBay is The Place to go for online auctions. It's as dominant as Microsoft is in operating systems.
You don't get to use a monopoly in one area to manipulate the market in another.
Re:Cash2india is far more relevant than Google... (Score:4, Insightful)
Now I'm starting to wish I had more of that stuff. Paying for an expensive ebay auction entirely in Canadian Tire Money would be a whole new kind of awesome.
Re:Oh! Can I Please Be the First?!? (Score:3, Insightful)
If I hadn't been reading more astutely I would have thought you were talking about Ebay's website...ahem.
Re:Cant Beat Em? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Oh! Can I Please Be the First?!? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Oh! Can I Please Be the First?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
But, I wonder if they can get around the monopolistic laws? Fair practice laws?
Re:I like ebay less and less. (Score:5, Insightful)
More unfortunately, there isn't likely to be.
The benefits of the network effect are simply too great. Buyers stay on eBay because there's a big selection of stuff and they can find what they want. Sellers stay on eBay because more buyers bidding on things means higher prices for their goods. You'd think the higher prices would drive people away, and I'm sure some people check Yahoo! auctions because stuff sells for less, but most people learn they can rarely ever find what they're looking for there, and that it's a waste of time to do anything other than bid a little more at eBay. So buyers won't defect until sellers defect.
Sellers won't defect unless another site offers them some other savings sufficient to offset the lower prices their auctions will go for (at least until the site gets size competitive with eBay). That is, competitors need a value proposition such that
[ebay sale price] - [competitor's sale price] is less than [ebay's fees] - [competitors fees]
So, how much do they have to reduce fees by? I studied this a few years ago, comparing auctions for like goods across a wide range of categories, and found that a competitor needs to set negative fees to offer a value proposition to sellers. That is, they would have to pay the sellers a commission on each auction to attract them.
Good luck trying to get someone to back that position for long enough to get size-competitive with eBay.
Of course, there are also other ways one might attract buyers to try to increase auction sale prices to reduce the fee gap. I wrote up a lot of these ideas for a business plan for a company that wanted to compete with eBay. First and foremost of them was to create parametric search system to help people find things based on including and excluding features particular to that product line. Unfortunately, eBay already did this. Is might be done better, but it's basically there. Ebay's searching features have improved radically in recent years.
There are many other things that could be done. A dramatically different infrastructure could greatly reduce server and bandwidth costs, taking some of the sting out of the required fee difference. But all the tricks I had left in my bag added together probably couldn't allow a new competitor to succeed. Perhaps others have better ideas.
My advice to anyone who wants to enter the general online auction market is "good luck."
Re:Coming Soon: (Score:1, Insightful)
Dumb.
Ridiculous, and spreading FUD too... (Score:5, Insightful)
I quote:
I wonder why eBay believes Google Checkout is unsafe, unreliable and/or inconvenient? Seriously, this isn't an obscure, complicated, foreign payment system. It's pretty obvious to me why they really did this, and with this, they're most likely lying about it.
As the link in the article summary also says, even calling Google Checkout something lame like being "too new" doesn't hold much water, given what Google Checkout is.
I have nothing against eBay doing this, but only if they up front told either exactly why, the harsh reality and competition, or didn't comment on it at all. Anything would be better than lying or spreading FUD about certain competitors like this. It's really bad style IMO.
What corporations are allowed to do (Score:3, Insightful)
Uhm... no. There are laws and rules and regulations they have to follow, just like there are laws and regulations and rules *you* have to follow.
Re:Google should ban Ebay listings from searches (Score:1, Insightful)
And if google makes a ebay-like site, a tiny portion of google fans will go there. But most online sellers are already established at ebay, and most buyers already know and like the place. They won't use google's, just like they won't use other auction sites (like yahoo's), nor most of the google products (besides search and perhaps gmail). And it'll stay beta for 5 years + (people will trust a "beta" product for their money surely)
Please consider purchasing your new from the following vendors who have an established track record.
Right. And google has a good track record you'd say? Except when it comes to money seemingly. "Click fraud" anyone? And ridiculous settlement for the class action lawsuit? i.e. For every thousand dollars you can prove, we'll give you 5 back in forms of more advertizing i.e. more fraudulent clicks (and an opt-out strategy to screw people over)! And all the logging they do. And China. etc. I don't think they're necessarily better than eBay/paypal really.
I welcome competition and alternatives, but not from google. They're becoming the new Microsoft (actually, I find them scarier now)
Of course, this is slashdot, and I've talked against the god-oh-mighty google, so this'll get modded to "-500, not a google fanboy"
What does Google think. (Score:2, Insightful)
All you litigation-prone folk would make bad business managers. Google and EBay are both profitable companies. Litigation for its own sake is for losers. They are right now negotiating. That's business.
Google Checkout Was Already Banned on eBay (Score:5, Insightful)
The interesting thing is to see how strictly eBay will enforce this rule - if they're really going to focus on forcing Google Checkout out of eBay, or if it'll be yet another rule that is only enforced from time to time.
The company I work for is an eBay PowerSeller, and we've noticed there's basically three types of policy violations in eBay's eyes:
1. those that eBay checks for when you list an item (try listing an item with 'pearl' in the title sometime to see what I'm talking about) and then either denies your listing or displays a warning message and flags your listing;
2. violations that eBay only acts on when reporting by another user (usually NOT a buyer, it's almost always a competitor);
3. violations that eBay is worried enough about that they write a program to automatically scan all open listings looking for violations.
Right now, it looks like Google Checkout falls into the second type - there's over 3,000 active listings that mention accepting Google Checkout (ref. http://search-desc.ebay.com/search/search.dll?sof
So eBay obviously hasn't stepped up enforcement of this rule. However, if the number of current listings that mention Google Checkout drops suddenly, then it will be obvious that eBay has started treating Google Checkout like an item in the third type, not the second. This would be a policy shift to explicitly combat Google Checkout, instead of just discouraging it.
I don't think PayPal would be around today, or would have the market share it does, if it wasn't for eBay buying them out and then cramming PayPal down everyone's throats. The stories I could tell about how PayPal really "protects" both the buyers and the sellers and how completely they've managed to brainwash so many buyers and sellers.... But as long as eBay is "not an auction" and PayPal is "not a bank" and "not a credit card", I don't see anything changing any time soon. eBay has already shown that it is all but unbeatable in the auction marketplace (look at Yahoo Auctions, and they're -free- now; Overstock.com auctions are another competitor that is all but defeated) - they've so completely tied PayPal into eBay and integrated it into so many of their requirements (there's certain buying and selling requirements that force you to establish a PayPal account, even if you never plan to accept or use PayPal) that I don't see anyone defeating PayPal, at least in the auction marketplace, any time soon.
Google's best remaining chance to take PayPal on, head-on, would be to setup Google Auctions, and even then, eBay really has captured a frightening amount of loyalty and dedication from hundreds of thousands of buyers and sellers...it would be an interesting fight.
LMAO (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Coming Soon: (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't you mean Google Auctions beta?
I suppose... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Here's Why (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Oh! Can I Please Be the First?!? (Score:2, Insightful)
The problem with you is that you believe "rights" appear from nowhere and that all institutions in society are obligated to you. The unfortunate reality is that, in this space, eBay can do whatever they want to restrict your rights for payment method--except creating their own currency. It is not a federally, state, or constitutionally protected right. Though by no means I represent anyone here but my opinions, Google probably could care less. In fact, who knows? Google probably enjoys this restriction.
If there was a case, it wouldn't hold water. Cause if it did, we could all go to Arco and sue them for forcing you to pay Cash to get the gas prices as advertised on their signs. And of course, all the Mom and Pop stores that don't take Visa...
Re:fud (Score:5, Insightful)
Bzzz...Wrong!
Google Checkout has been around for years; it's what they use to transfer money around for AdSense/AdWords. What's new is that they're finally opening it up to be used for any and all services.
Here is an article [auctionbytes.com] with an interesting quote from Google, "Google Checkout is not a beta product. Google has a long history in billing and payments for AdWords and for premium services, such as Google Video."
I would wager my entire net worth that eBay knows that Google Checkout is well established. I'm guessing they crapped their pants and reacted with this changed policy. I also heard that they changed their payment policy name from "Safe Payment Policy" to "Accepted Payment Policy" with the addition of Google Checkout to their list of unacceptable payment policies.
As others have said, this is clearly a case where eBay is using their monopoly to control another market, and I sincerely hope that there is restitution. You can bet that I will be using Google Checkout for my auctions on eBay, and if eBay tries to suspend my account, they will be getting a letter from my lawyer (as I'm sure they've already received a few from Google's lawyers).
Re:In Other News . . . . (Score:3, Insightful)
That is not an apt analogy. eBay are not the sellers - they are just offering the service, and taking a fee. It should be up to sellers how they complete their transaction. It's not at all like department-store credit cards. They could ban payment of eBay fees by various methods, but why should they restrict their customer's private transactions?
Re:fud (Score:4, Insightful)
This is simply not true. Ebay has all sorts of means to verify this. For example, I'm sure Google would be more than happy to answer any questions that ebay has regarding their security polices. I'm sure the financial institutions that Google works with to provide this service would also be just as helpful.
The FUD is the whole "lack of a track record" claim. It's completely subjective. This isn't some fly-by-night operation without established credit or capital reserves, it's freakin Google. There's no credible evidence that there's a security issue here, there is only fear, uncertainty and doubt being spread on the part of ebay. It's the very definition of FUD.
If only google would ban eBay! (Score:2, Insightful)
I can't stand going to Google and searching for something, only to have a bunch of auction spam pages come up in the top links
Heck yeah, let Google ban eBay and bask in the glory as we all rejoice!
Transporter_ii
Re:The future-- (Score:2, Insightful)
I get it -- you probably don't have a car. You don't have to drive to the store, they will ship it to you - if you want, but most people (myself included) are impatient, I have a BMW and enjoy driving and I want my new LCD screen right now, not tomorrow and I don't want to risk it getting banged up in shipping or stolen off my doorstep (less insurance!)
Even if you have it shipped - it will come from local inventory it will be cheaper, it will arrive in one day via ground (cheaper shipping).
RE: Sales Tax --
Yes, you have to pay sales tax EITHER WAY. A lot of online users make the assumption that there is no sales tax on the Internet -- this is NOT TRUE.
If you're a company you have to report the sales tax right now.
I expect within 2-3 years the that the states will have set aside their petty differences and figured out an Internet sales tax. There is just too much money on the table (and that number is growing everyday)
RE: Salespeople --
It's very likely that there will be some sort of feedback mechanism, so if the salesperson is rude then it's likely google would stop sending business there - they don't want to alienate customers at any price, it's just not worth it.
However as far as "pushy" salespeople -- like it or not, they do generate results, the companies which employ them generate more money, and can afford to do more marketing and give out more loss leaders. Welcome to business 101.
Re:The future-- (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I like ebay less and less. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Google Checkout Was Already Banned on eBay (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Another stupid YRO submission (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the reason Google is so popular among this crowd is that they tend to rise above this sort of thing. For instance if you search for an address they offer the yahoo maps option as well. If you have a gmail account, they do several things that allow you to avoid lock-in (allowing you to use a different email as the from address, forwarding mail for free, etc). Google may be as greedy as the rest of them, it's just that their strategy for making the most money involves being perceived (by those who pay attention) as being "non evil". And that's good, I hope more companies adopt that strategy. And I hope people do pay attention.
So who knows if what ebay is doing is illegal. It is against the interests of its users, as well as being disingenuous to say the least. When a company does such a thing, I hope the users continue to make a big deal of it.
Re:I like ebay less and less. (Score:5, Insightful)
eBay uses a one-size-fits-all approach to the UI. If a company were to come along and just knock one niche out of the park, then they can become *the* player (in jewelry, for example). eBay loses out on that market, then another, then another. It happens slowly, but I believe it will most definitely happen, especially if the top brass doesn't get booted out soon.
My point is that sellers will leave eBay when it stops being a decent market for them. It is quite cut-throat today, but clearly there is still a great power to listing on eBay. It isn't the end-all, but it is a useful tool to an online merchant.
Google could throw a much bigger blow to eBay by just putting more emphasis on Froogle. The potential is there, but they seem to be waiting on it, and I don't think it is intentional, but rather just the result of a ton of other projects and how management works there. eBay hasn't gotten local down, but Google already has a big piece to it figured out.
The whole thing is a mess. (Score:5, Insightful)
I use several sites for buying goods, but EBay is a good example, so I'll use that:
As noted throughout this discussion, EBay only allows certain payment methods - foremost is Paypal. The others aren't anything like as useful because they are restricted to a geographic location (err.. why?) or just a way of processing credit card payments. Worse still, a lot of sellers seem to be locked into Paypal as well. So, OK, I use Paypal - I don't have any major reasons to worry about that except... Paypal won't allow me to use my (Italian) bank account for payments. Others, such as netteller will, but they in turn won't allow me to transfer funds to Paypal. In fact, even though I have several on-line account facilities, it is very nearly impossible to move funds from one to the other.
What gives? These days I can route data from anywhere to anywhere via the 'net using a plethora of methods; but not money. I wonder if this is deliberate.
IT'S A MESS!
Re:Say hello to my little antitrust lawsuit! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What corporations are allowed to do (Score:1, Insightful)
The body corporate as a legal entity exists to absolve individuals of legal and moral responsibilty for their actions in business.
The law elevates corporations over individuals. In dispute, corporations are always right, individuals are always wrong. (Credit reporting agencies). A corporation can rob an individual blind, then report the individual to a credit agency. Unless you have more money than the corporation to take them to court and win, the corporation is right.
The difference between corporations and individuals and the laws they must adhere to is the size of their legal budget. I cannot afford to pay off the law. Corporations can.
Re:Oh! Can I Please Be the First?!? (Score:3, Insightful)
One Word:
BETA