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eBay Bans Google Payments
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Thu Jul 06, 2006 07:50 PM
from the credit-no-good-here dept.
from the credit-no-good-here dept.
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."
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It's been tit for tat for some time; eBay bans Google payments, Google tries to throw a party mocking eBay, in response to which the service pulls all of its ads, fun corporate shenanigans. It seems as though, for the moment, the two companies have made up. News.com is reporting that eBay ads will once again be serviced via Google's adwords service, but that they will also be using alternative methods to a greater extent in the future. "Hani Durzy, a spokesman for San Jose, California-based eBay, said his company later on Friday would begin advertising on Google, but at reduced levels than previously. eBay had been buying tens of millions of keyword ads on Google each year. 'I will tell you it will be in a much more limited way than it was before,' Durzy told Reuters. 'What we found is that we were not as dependent on AdWords as some people thought.'"
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Sir_Kurt writes "In eBay's latest FAQ, they explain that sellers (for the good of the buyers) will no longer be allowed to accept checks or money orders as payment. They can take electronic payments only. So, will Google Checkout, Checkout by Amazon or Amazon Flexible Payment be allowed? No, says eBay: 'Google's and Amazon's products and services compete with eBay on a number of levels, so we are not going to allow them on eBay.' Options are limited to PayPal, ProPay, direct credit payments to the seller, and 'payment upon pickup.' But remember, this is for our own good!"
eBay ran into trouble earlier this year for trying to restrict payment options.
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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.
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.
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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?
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Re:Oh! Can I Please Be the First?!? (Score:5, Funny)
They won't take google's money but they will take Canadian Tire money
So, google just has to get Crappy^WCanadian Tire to print up more Canadian Tire currency ...
I can see it now ... Google buys a million bux of Canadian Tire money and uses it as their "float" for transferring money. Oh, and since you can get Canadian Tire bills for as low as $0.05, its great for micropayments since you can't send coins through the mail :-)
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Re:Oh! Can I Please Be the First?!? (Score:5, Funny)
Don't laugh - some Canadian Tire money is collectible - there re different variants from different "eras". I've got some of the old 3 cent ones kicking around (I keep it rather than spend it - I've got about $70 of the stuff)
On a side note, one guy I know is a retired trucker - one of his friends was making a run through New York, tolk the hooker that he had only Canadian money, and paid her with Canadian Tire money. $20 blow job was two 10 cent Canadian Tire bills (after all, they just looked for the denomination, not whether it was dollars or cents).
I guess that's why he said "Ain't America Great!"
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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.
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Re:But, but...Master Card/Visa (Score:5, Informative)
But that's not the point: it's never been illegal to have a monopoly in the first place. When you leverage your monopoly in one market to compete unfairly in another, you've crossed the line. Google has already directly threatened to bring anti-trust cases, so I'd guess that's where this is all headed.
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Re:Why would Google stop there? (Score:5, Funny)
Hmmm... that would be a terrible name. But still better than bGay, I suppose...
*** rimshot ***
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Re:Why would Google stop there? (Score:5, Funny)
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
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Re:Why would Google stop there? (Score:5, Funny)
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I like ebay less and less. (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, there isn't a good alternative yet.
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."
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How Ironic (Score:5, Funny)
Canadian Tire Money? Sure. GoogleCash? Oh no. (Score:5, Funny)
Heh, auctions.google.com (Score:5, Interesting)
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]If it's concern for the customer. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
My guess about how this happened: (Score:5, Funny)
An eBay executive was sitting around thinking, how can I get $5,000,000 of bad, sink-the-company publicity for almost free?
YES, that's it!!!! Do something against Google, which is, today, the equivalent of doing something against cute kittens.
Google should ban Ebay listings from searches... (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps Google should consider removing all ebay auctions from their search results? I'm sure the same phony logic that prohibits Google payments from ebay auctions could be used to remove auctions from search results, such as:
"Ebay auctions are not categorically safe transactions, so as a safety precaution, we are eliminating ebay auctions from our search results. Please consider purchasing your new from the following vendors who have an established track record. And coincidentally, these vendors accept payments with Google Payments."
Let's see who needs who then, ebay...
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.
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.
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.
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Re:Say hello to my little antitrust lawsuit! (Score:5, Informative)
Paypal has some history [paypalsucks.com]
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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.)
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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.
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