eBay begin to enforce paperless payments policy

29/01/2009 at 23:28

eBay.com have begun blocking listings which offer to accept paper payments. The new Accepted Payments Policy was introduced on 20th October 2008, but sellers were given a grace period up to 15th January 2009 to update their listings.

eBay say they’ve started blocking “based on descriptions where sellers are most likely to still have violating text, and where we are confident our filters have high accuracy”. In other words if your listing still offers to accept checks (cheques for our UK readers ;-) ) or money orders you won’t be able to list them.

eBay will scan sellers additional checkout instructions (additional payment instructions in the UK) to start with as that’s the most likely place sellers will mention payment methods. They’ll then step up their filters to scan listing descriptions as well when determining which listings to block.

Sellers should be reassured that eBay’s filters are intelligent enough to differentiate between “check out my Store” and “personal check”, although I’d probably recommend you don’t include text like “We don’t accept personal checks” as that might be filtered incorrectly.

eBay advise all sellers who list on eBay.com to update their listings to remove mentions of banned payment methods as quickly as possible, but in particular to update checkout instructions immediately to ensure your listings don’t fail.

Most most third party tools will display an error to the seller if eBay block a listing based on this policy. In the Sell Your Item form a clear message will be displayed if the listing is filtered based on a banned payment method.

If listings are reported, even if eBay’s own filters didn’t block them, then they’ll be taken down by customer services on a case by case basis.