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eBay Agrees To Hold Off Requiring PayPal For Payments In Australia

from the not-like-it-really-had-a-choice dept

Mon, Jun 30th 2008 8:29pm — Mike Masnick

You may recall that eBay execs were trying to require the use of subsidiary PayPal for payments in Australia -- which resulted in a bunch of protests. That, in turn, resulted in the Australia Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) saying that this probably broke the law. Not surprisingly, eBay has now agreed to indefinitely delay the plans to require PayPal, saying that it would wait for a final ruling from the ACCC. Of course, it still seems like a situation where this would present another opportunity for eBay competitors to try to steal customers away from eBay.

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Filed Under: accc, australia, paypal
Companies: ebay, paypal

7 Comments

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Rekrul, 30 Jun 2008 @ 9:34pm

I'm in the US and when I first heard of this I sent an email of portest to eBay, because if they succeed in doing this in Australia, they'll do it everywhere. The trained monkeys working the help address sent me back one of the FAQ pages about keeping my PayPal account safe. Then I got an email from one of the trained monkeys at PayPal asking how they could help with my account problems. They can't even correctly read the contents of an email message but they want to be trusted with financial information?
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Paul`, 1 Jul 2008 @ 12:44am

I'm an Australian and I have already moved to local substitutes for it. There's a few adds running on TV for online auctions that are locally owned and they look promising.
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Pirateguybrush, 1 Jul 2008 @ 1:06am

Paul, what local substitutes are you using?
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- Doug Robb, 1 Jul 2008 @ 2:11am
  
  Re: Alternatives to Ebay in Australia
  Try looking at trading post (that name with .com.au on the end). Owned by Telstra and backed by their Yellow pages etc they have the to potential to do well - in terms of money they can throw at this project they have very deep pockets.
  
  The execs at ebay that tried this on should be sacked because there are now plenty of people voting with their feet when they wouldn't have bothered to look for alternatives if ebay hadn't pulled such a dumb, dumb stunt .....
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- Paul`, 1 Jul 2008 @ 3:20am
  
  Re:
  Trading Post mostly, there was another I've used once and now I can't find the link...
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Anno Nymous, 2 Jul 2008 @ 9:25pm

eBay withdraws from PayPal only plan
eBay has now withdrawn the request from ACCC to allow it's uncompetitive behaviour, i.e. they will not try to have PayPal only on eBay Australia. While this sounds great they still require sellers to offer PayPal as one of the payment methods. And that means that we sellers will be slugged with higher fees, that will result in higher costs to buyers and that will raise eBay profits.... So they win!

I want to see more listings like this one...
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Joseph E. Krois Jr., 3 Jul 2008 @ 8:37am

Ebay will not accept cash as payment ???????
I was notified some weeks ago that payment on a winning
lot on Ebay could not be paid in cash. I believe Ebay is being unpatriotic by not letting a winning bidder pay in
US Dollars (cash).
Since when does a U.S. company have the right to not allow a
buyer to pay in cash or a seller to have cash as one of many means to settle a sale. Is our Dollar such a bad instrument to restrict its use.
Have a Happy Fourth of July 2008
Ebay should be ashamed of itself......
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