You may have heard that eBay recently announced its intention to force buyers and sellers to use PayPal on its monopoly online auction site. eBay currently allows users to use other payment methods such as direct bank deposit.
According to iTWire eBay has asked the ACCC to excuse it from the trade practices act over the move.
eBay excuses its actions by arguing that users of PayPal are 4 times less likely to open a dispute about an item. It is understandable that eBay would want advise its customers of those statistics and make recommendations about the best ways to trade.
However, forcing you to risk your money with PayPal is another question altogether.
Remember that PayPal is not a bank.
Unlike the money that you deposit at a real bank, the money in your PayPal account is at far more risk. Moreover PayPal doesn’t behave anything like a bank, and according to many reports intelligible communication with PayPal is practically impossible.
We hope that the ACCC acts to force eBay to abandon this move that is sure to disrupt the bulk of Australia’s retail eCommerce activity.
Related posts:
About Mark Standeven
PayPal is far from safe. There have been many fraudsters attempting to rip people off via PayPal. Just google ‘paypal fraud’, sit back and grab a cuppa, or a few cuppas
Interesting comments on PayPal. In Europe, PayPal is registered as a bank and merchants with appropriate business accounts can transfer their funds regularly to their ‘real’ accounts.
PayPal also takes fraud very seriously, but due to the huge volume of transactions going through every second, their customer service isn’t what we’d all like it to be.