Published on May 12, 2010 ACCC forces eBay to allow sellers to offer more payment options than just Paypal
After a two year investigation, the ACCC has ruled eBay in breach of the Trade Practices Act for their practice of requiring sellers to always offer Paypal as a payment option in all transactions, even though they fully own Paypal.
eBay has now written to sellers advising them that from mid-July, transactions will need to be completed by either Paypal, Paymate or a merchant credit card facility.
There’s no relief in this decision for cash only sellers, as they will still need to offer a credit card facility via one of those three options as well as bank transfer.
“We’ve been looking at that requirement where eBay said sellers must offer PayPal as one of the payment methods. We’ve had discussions with senior people at eBay and they have agreed to drop this,” said ACCC chairman Graeme Samuel.
There is some fine print – eBay’s email to sellers to announce the changes noted that if a merchant credit card facility is offered instead of Paypal or Paymate, they will need to “verify” their credit card merchant facility with eBay. How this will be done is yet to be defined.
We welcome this reduction in restrictiveness as we are believers in fairness in the ecommerce industry and hope that the ACCC does continue to monitor eBay’s behaviour as they have stated that they will.
It should not end here. In our opinion, there’s still room for improvement in the business practices of all auction websites in the industry – globally. For example, if you had a shop in a mall, would you let the mall owner take almost 8% of your earnings?
Editorial Note: With Ozcart shopping cart websites you only pay your monthly flat rate fee. There are no transaction costs and there’s no cut of your transactions going to us. We believe that you should keep your profits, because you earned them – we just lend you a tool to do it.
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