Comments on: PayPal make changes to the UK user agreement

By: FenLex

FenLex — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 11:42:26 +0000

The snappily entitled “No splitting” clause that requires all PayPal payments to be accepted for eBay transactions is still in the User Agreement.

As for PayPal’s business model, there is a section in the eBay Annual Report about a change in the mix of funding sources for PayPal payments being a risk to eBay Inc’s profitability.

The same section of the eBay Annual Report contains the statement (in the context of two class actions brought against PayPal, one by a group of US State Attorneys General) that changes in disclosure requirements about funding sources could also have an adverse effect on eBay Inc’s profitability – which is tantamount to a breathtaking admission that telling the truth would be bad for business!

By: amajorukpowerseller

amajorukpowerseller — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 10:02:50 +0000

Steve you are correct, the change kicked in on 4th June.

PayPal’s entire revenue model is based on steering payers towards paypal balance funded or bank funded transfers. They make NO money if you fund with a credit card. Scot Wingo wrote a great piece on this recently. Hence the way that buyers are influenced by the design of the site not to use cards to fund payments. Sneaky, really sneaky!

By: Steve

Steve — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 23:46:05 +0000

I’d gone about 9 months without seeing an e-cheque as they were “blocked” in my Payment Receiving Preferences, but since June 4th, I’ve had 6 of the damn things, including one which has not cleared from June 4th, and another that has been cancelled – but the buyer is no longer registered anyway, with 3 still waiting to clear.

They’re great for cashflow, and must be a huge improvement to the buying experience.

By: Sue Bailey

Sue Bailey — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 22:50:03 +0000

Buyers as a rule donâ€™t know what an eCheque is nor do they understand the consequences of paying with them. We donâ€™t see why we as sellers should have to do PayPalâ€™s dirty work for them.

I COMPLETELY agree with you there! PayPal are currently in fact pushing buyers towards echeques: if you try and pay by a credit or debit card, you get a message asking if you’d prefer to pay by bank transfer. I forget how they pitch the advantage of this to buyers, though there is an obvious monetary advantage to PayPal themselves. If they can’t communicate the deal correctly to buyers, they should ditch echeques altogether.

By: amajorukpowerseller

amajorukpowerseller — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 22:45:01 +0000

Sue, you are correct except I can state categorically that the eCheque block worked perfectly until early June. We had no echeque payments go through until that time, now all go through. There was a very badly worded error message though, stating to the effect that the seller had refused payment etc, which did create a lot of confusion.

The fact is that eCheques as they stand are a rotten method of payment. Rotten for buyers due to the delay and rotten for sellers due to being blamed for slow shipping. We’d much rather not accept them.

Buyers as a rule don’t know what an eCheque is nor do they understand the consequences of paying with them. We don’t see why we as sellers should have to do PayPal’s dirty work for them.

What they have done is manifestly unfair. The fact that they changed the message by the tickbox is clear evidence that a change was made and they knew exactly what they were doing i.e. taking away the eBay eCheque block.

By: Mark

Mark — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 20:47:54 +0000

I want to sell a high ticket item and PayPal offers ZERO protection for the buyer. I want to use escrow but I’m now forced to let the buyer pay through PayPal, lose a huge chunk of the money AND lose all the safety offered by escrow. This decision stinks. I hope the Monopolies & Mergers people are looking closely…

By: Josordoni

Josordoni — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 10:21:12 +0000

I’m still not getting half of my Paypal emails coming through. They all show up in SMP though, and I double check my Paypal account too. But it is all more admin that shouldn;t be necessary.

Fortunately, no problems with my eCheques recently, so I don’t know if they would have told me or not…

By: Sue Bailey

Sue Bailey — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 10:03:43 +0000

Kate, I’ve had exactly that happen two or three times over the last couple of months. I have been told quite categorically by PayPal that there is no possible way that they haven’t notified me, and the problem must be that I don’t, won’t or can’t read their email. So, what do we know

By: KateUK

KateUK — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 10:01:04 +0000

I noticed that Paypal seem to be pushing the “see how easy it is to pay from your bank account” option lately – which may account for the increase in echeques that I have seen. And I had an echeque “fail” yesterday – I only knew that because the buyer sent me a new payment with the message sayng “sorry was a problem with my pay pal had to resend payment”. When I checked my Paypal account the payment was showing as “cancelled” and yet I got no email at all from Paypal apart from the email notifying me of the second payment. Safe payment method? As we know, it’s not safe fro sellers.

By: Sue Bailey

Sue Bailey — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 20:25:18 +0000

“AMUKPS” – echeque blocking was never supposed to work for eBay; it was always supposed to only work for website payments. There used to be an extremely badly written clause that stated this. Then – unannounced – it did start working intermittently for eBay payments too. I’m reliably informed this was a glitch; certainly it often gave buyers an incorrect message that the seller had blocked their payment.

I don’t think allowing eBay sellers to block echeques is the answer. Buyers don’t know or understand the difference between funding a payment with a bank account and with a credit card, and why should they: as far as they’re concerned, either way, they’ve paid. The answer is to make echeques work efficiently; currently, going through the direct debit system, they are very cheap for PayPal but frankly crap for sellers. A better way to transfer buyers’ cash needs to be found.