June 26th, 2008 at 9:46 pm
After the draft announcement by the ACCC stating that eBay will not be given permission to institute its PayPal only policy, eBay was still hopeful of getting a decision in its favour.
This was evidenced by its original response to the announcement, dated 13th of June:
“eBay intends to work with the ACCC and hopes to achieve a final outcome which has the safety and security of eBay’s members as its paramount objective. eBay will delay the removal of other payment methods from the site until Tuesday 15 July.”
So anytime that you visited the site you have been reminded that this is only a slight delay. Once eBay, with all its meaningless assertions about promoting consumer safety gets it through the ACCC’s thick skull, then everything will be all right and the policy will by implemented as planned by the 15th of July.
But it seems as if someone has had a word in eBay’s ear about being a little too overconfident.
Today eBay made another announcement:
“Changes to eBay.com.au scheduled for 15 July are being postponed until the review process with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) regarding its recent draft notice is complete. As previously announced, eBay.com.au is continuing to work with the ACCC to achieve an outcome that benefits buyers and sellers.” and,
“Please note that some of our onsite communications may still refer to changes taking place on 15 July 2008. These communications are in the process of being updated.”
I wonder if they are finally seeing the light that their little plan is doomed. I wonder what will happen next?
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May 14th, 2008 at 10:45 am
eBay has just rolled out some significant changes to the feedback system. Once again the reasoning behind the moves is to increase buyer confidence in the system, happy buyers are repeat buyers.
Under the old system, buyers and sellers rated each other on the transaction with either a positive, neutral or negative score and a comment. Under this system there were some buyers who felt that they could not rate a seller accurately (if their performance was poor) because they feared retaliatory feedback. Often a buyer who rates a seller with negative feedback will receive a negative in response. eBay fears that this practice was driving customers away from eBay. Continue Reading »
April 29th, 2008 at 9:03 pm
If you have been keeping abreast of the announcements coming out of eBay recently, you will be aware that they are changing the payment option policy. In a nutshell you will only be able to offer PayPal as a payment option for all listings, bar cash for local pick-ups. If you haven’t heard, you can get up to speed by reading my post on it here.
If you are concerned about how this will affect your business, you now have the opportunity to ask questions of eBay staff via the Workshop forum on the eBay boards the Wednesday night. It is a live discussion and to be able to participate you first have to log onto the Discussion Boards, which can be found under the “Community” tab at the top right hand corner of any eBay page. If you have not registered with the boards before do so before the workshop starts. You can use your eBay ID, many people do, but some people also create new user names just for posting on the boards, to protect their eBay identity.
Once you have registered you can post questions to any of the discussion boards along with the Workshop board which will host the forum on the recent changes to the payment policy. You will find the Workshop board here. You are free to just watch the discussion unfold or put your own questions/concerns to the eBay staff. If you do have questions or concerns this is a good opportunity to have them addressed directly by eBay. If you can’t make it, you will find that the discussion will be archived and you can read through the discussion any time it suits you, you just won’t be able to put your own points across.
Anyway, its on Wednesday night, 30th April, 9.30-10.30pm.
April 23rd, 2008 at 9:58 pm
In our eBay classes we talk about how to protect ourselves from online fraud. One of the methods we discuss is, never respond to an email from eBay or PayPal that asks you to click on a link and access your account. It is important to note that no company or financial institution will ever email their customers asking for their account information.
If you do receive one, then it is most likely to be from a someone pretending to be eBay. The purpose behind such an email, called a phishing email, is to con you into providing your user id and password. This information is then used by the phisher to hijack your account and your good eBay reputation. Having access to your account, the hijacker puts up a high valued item onto eBay under your name, seeing that you have such a good reputation the unsuspecting bidder buys and pays for the item not realising that they will never ever see the goods they paid for. The phisher/account hijacker now moves onto the next account and does it all over again. Apparently this is quite a problem on eBay. Continue Reading »
