As well as paying for goods without having to queue, the report reveals shoppers can look forward to being able to carry digital loyalty cards, promotional offers and receipts on their phones – keeping everything in one place creating a virtual shopping hub.

PayPal’s findings are based on Forrester Consulting interviews with 10 senior executives from major UK retailers and other businesses, representing a combined 2010 turnover of £85 billion. 45 million Britons use a mobile phone and over a third of mobile users surveyed by Forrester have used the mobile internet to buy something from a retailer’s website. In the future a whole range of devices will be used to make payments direct to the retailer – regardless of whether you’re in store or shopping online.

This isn’t just wishful thinking – back in June of this year Pizza Express rolled out an iPhone app allowing their customers to pay for meals via PayPal. Mind you there’s still a long way to go. The coffee shop I visited today they don’t even take cards and are still strictly a cash based business. Thankfully they spare you the embarrassment of not being able to pay for your cake and tea by telling every customer up front but you have to wonder how they’ll cope with accepting PayPal or indeed any form of mobile phone payments.

There’s also the tricky problem of security tags and the embarrassment of a security guard accosting you at the door because he didn’t see you pay at the checkout. However those problems aside I’d love to go shopping for Christmas presents and just scan and pay for products with PayPal on my mobile and have them automatically delivered to my home – shopping with no bags to carry has it’s attractions.

Consumers will be directed to merge their Checkout account with their Google Wallet account. They can automatically transition their Checkout account to Google Wallet the next time they sign in or make a purchase online and their Checkout history will then be available in their Wallet account.

Thankfully Google recognise that merchants won’t take too kindly to having to change their websites a month before Christmas, so shoppers using Google Wallet will be able to make purchases seamlessly on merchant sites that accept Google Checkout. Buyers will simply be able to log in and pay with their Wallet account… assuming that they’re aware that their Google Wallet will work on sites with the Google Checkout branding.

Once Christmas is out of the way in the new year Google will begin transitioning merchants Checkout logos to Wallet logos, and doubtless there’ll be some back end tinkering to do on your website if you currently accept Checkout.

Realistically this is an admission that Checkout hasn’t caught on, otherwise Google could have built offline payments into Checkout rather than launching them as a rebranded Google Wallet. How well Wallet will catch on has yet to be seen. The big question is will you change the Google Checkout logos on your websites to Google Wallet, or will you just press the delete button and allow buyers to use other payment methods?

That’s a lot of “ifs”, but it’s an insight into the cashless future we’re being promised where we won’t need the exact change for our bus fare but can simply pay with our mobile.

I can understand that the NJ Transit partnership with Google Wallet is only available at New York Penn Station ticket vending machines and ticket windows, Newark Liberty International Airport Rail Station and selected bus routes, but Google Wallet itself is severely hampered by only being available on a single cell phone model from a particular provide with currently just on bank’s credit card being supported as a funding source.

The limitations are not going to make it available to the vast majority of travellers. However in a few years time we could all be paying for travel with a payment system embedded in our mobile phones.

With the Pilot once a purchase has been made eBay will request payment from the buyer and once eBay has the funds they’ll notify the seller that the item should be despatched. The seller then needs to ship the product and when they mark it as despatched this triggers the payment from eBay to the seller.

The big deal on this test is Buyer Protection. Currently buyers are protected for their purchases if they pay with PayPal. Under the pilot with eBay collecting the funds all acceptable payment methods will be covered under Buyer Protection. Buyers have the option to pay with Bank Transfer, PayPal, Skrill (the new name of Moneybookers) or credit card/debit card through either PayPal or Skrill.

As a side benefit the pilot will also ensure that a wider range of payment options are available to buyers on a consistent basis. All sellers participating in the pilot will have the same set of payment options offered on their items so buyers will always have the choice of using their favoured payment method.

All newly registered sellers on eBay.de and eBay.at will be included in the payments pilot. All of their items listed on eBay will have direct payment options to eBay which means buyers around the world buying from these sellers will see the range of eBay payment options.

Payments from eBay to the seller can be either through PayPal or bank transfer, and similar to current PayPal holds the frequency will be dependent on the seller status including if they are a business seller with an established trading history (immediate payout) or Business seller without a trading history or who are below standard (7 day payout) or Private sellers (14 day payout).

eBay say that it’s too early to say if the pilot will be rolled out to more sellers or in more eBay territories. They will of course thoroughly analyse the results of the pilot to determine if it has the desired effect of increasing trust on eBay, particularly for higher value purchases from newly registered sellers.

I do like the way the new payment model offers choice of payment methods to buyers and increases buyer protection. I’m not so sure that sellers with their own merchant banking facilities for accepting credit/debit cards or those who already accept bank transfer will welcome delays in receiving their funds.

However the most important data point from the pilot will be to see if it increase the frequency and value of purchases from buyers. If sales volume and value increase than any change in payment options is likely to be a secondary consideration and something we’ll all just have to live with.

Think Facebook credits for Farmville upgrades and you’ll get the idea of where Zong fits in the market. To make a purchase just enter your mobile phone number onscreen and you’ll receive a text with a one time confirmation PIN code. Confirming your purchase with the PIN and wait for your phone bill to arrive, although with Zong+ you can link your credit or debit card to your mobile phone number and get double your purchase.

You may wonder why PayPal would want to buy this mobile text/billing company and where the interest in social network gaming credits lies. Also if PayPal have an interest in this market don’t they have the expertise to build their own solution? The truth is that all PayPal are really interested in, and the reason they’re coughing up $240 million for Zong is who they know.

Zong have connections with more than 250 mobile carriers in 45 countries and that’s what PayPal want. Zong have done the legwork and with the acquisition PayPal will be well placed to exploit the mobile payments market and take advantage of the billing relationships already set up by Zong.

Richard North, the Chairman of the Payments Council said:

It’s in the DNA of the Payments Council to consult and listen to all those people who actually make payments and use cheques. Listening to over 600 stakeholder groups, working with the banks and following our appearance before the Treasury Select Committee, we have concluded we should reassure customers that the cheque is staying.

Of course, as cheque guarantee cards were scrapped at the end of last month, the usefulness of cheques is limited – but some people do continue to use them to pay at a distance. Just this week at work we’ve had two customers request to pay by cheque — the first in the last two years!

When I was selling on eBay, some buyers were wedded to cheques and refused to use any online method of payment, either because of security concerns, or because they didn’t have any other means of payment. As a seller, I loathed them: slow, made out to the wrong name, liable to bounce slowly and causing me a trip to the bank to pay them in, I wanted electronic means of payment every time.

What do you reckon? Are you happy to see cheques reprieved, or are they already a thing of the past? Leave us a comment.

eBay are aware of the problem and say that it’s affecting 25% of buyers with the message “Sorry, we could not complete your request at this time. Please try again in a few minutes. If this problem persists, report an issue to eBay support”. However some buyers are getting a message which consists simply of a full stop “.”

eBay say the issue is caused by eBay Next Generation Checkout, we’ll update you when the issue is fixed which I hope is soon – I have only had 30% of today’s sales paid and have had telephone calls with buyers one of who hasn’t had a single one of their sales paid for today.

Edited to add This glitch has now been fixed and payments should be completed as normal.

eBay has made a really interesting payment acquisition according to the Boston Globe. It’s only a three man start up outfit, but Fig Card, founded just over a year ago has apparently attracted the attention of John Donahoe eBay’s CEO, who snapped up the company which will now, unsurprisingly, report to PayPal.

Fig aim to make local in-person payments via your mobile handset simple. All you need to do is download an app to your mobile phone and so long as the retailer has Fig connected up to their point of sale till solution.

When you’re ready to pay you launch the app, click ready to pay when you reach the cashier and once you confirm the amount payment is complete.

Currently the solution charges your credit card, but I strongly suspect by the time it’s patent is approved and the Fig Card is rolled out further than the current small pilot program in Boston that it will morph into a PayPal app.

One of the best parts of the Fig Card is the ability for the retailer to use it as an electronic loyalty card or of course to offer discount coupons. It would be a simple matter to add social integration to enable users to post their purchases to Twitter or Facebook and let their friends know when they find a great restaurant for example.

The lines between off line and online commerce are blurring according to eBay and they’re looking at social, local and mobile (with the somewhat awkward portmanteau abbreviation, SoLoMo). It’s the equivalent of the old print yellow pages but better. Being able to market to customers in the vicinity of your business, and more importantly take payment in a convenient way for the customer is the aim and Fig Card ticks all the boxes as well as being a perfect integration for eBay’s PayPal payments business.

What’s prompted me to write about Amazon is a call from a friend who’s been hit with an Amazon “Velocity Limit and Account Review”. Amazon conduct reviews when sales volumes or inventory are not supported by sufficient buyer feedback or an established history. The reviews are a routine part of Amazon’s commitment to improving the customer experience (or to put it bluntly to make sure that buyers won’t be let down by under-performing sellers).

During the account review withdrawing funds from Amazon are temporarily suspended. Although typically the review will only take a few days if you supply all the information requested, it’s a worrying time for any seller. Most sellers should have sufficient working capital for it not to be a problem, but naturally an unexpected review raises concerns arise around how long funds will be held for and how it will affect cash flow, especially when the amount runs into thousands of pounds.

I spoke to Amazon to find out more about the account reviews and they told me that once review is over there are a number of possible outcomes. The seller might at best be restored to a normal disbursement of funds, or for example they may be limited to withdrawing funds once every 14 days. It’s worth noting that even if you can only withdraw funds every 14 days it’s not a rolling reserve – when you make a withdrawal you can expect to receive all funds up to and including payments made the day before.

If Amazon still have concerns over your account in some circumstance there may be a 30 day disbursement period or, for some sellers operating in particularly sensitive categories or with no track record of selling off Amazon, there may in rare circumstance be a rolling reserve applied.

It should be remembered that this is nothing abnormal in the payments industry. eBay and PayPal typically hold funds for new sellers for up to 21 days or when positive feedback is received and have rolling reserves for higher risk sellers. Anyone with a merchant credit card agreement will be aware that it’s some time before payments from customer reach their bank account.

So what can you do to get ready for Christmas? Well the first thing is to get your account set up and start selling on Amazon today, the ramp up in sales on Amazon starts right at the beginning of October. Allowing time for listing integration and the accumulation of feedback (which helps conversion as well as disbursement of funds flexibility) there is a big benefit in registering within the next 1-2 weeks. The quicker you ramp up your sales the quicker you’ll trigger an account review (if it’s necessary) and the quicker you can get back to business as usual.

It’s also worth remembering that some categories on Amazon (such as Toys) are gated and have restrictions on new sellers. If you miss the cut off point (typically in September) for selling your first products in these categories you won’t be able to list in them until after the holiday season.

Finally there are two ways that you can set your Amazon account up. There is a self service option where you simply visit Amazon and set your account up online, but for businesses a better option is the assisted process where you’re talked through the process with Amazon’s business account managers.

A big advantage of the assisted process is that you’ll have a named contact within Amazon who you can turn to for help if you later run into an account review or need any other assistance in the early days ramping up your Amazon business.

Amazon are keen to recruit quality sellers and want to help them to be successful and ensure that sellers are set to maximise sales over the coming months. If you’d like assistance to create and launch an Amazon account in time for Christmas peak you can email them at bizdev-UK@amazon.co.uk.

First and foremost of course you’ll need transport for your stock, but once you’re at the show you’ll need a method to take payments. Unless you already have a merchant account you’re unlikely to have a portable credit card machine, but 2nd best is PayPal Virtual Terminal on your laptop.

PayPal Virtual Terminal allows you to take payments even if you don’t have a website. You don’t need any to buy any hardware or install software, but if you want to swipe credit cards rather typing numbers in the USB Swiper looks like a great solution.

To use Virtual Terminal you will of course need an Internet connection so the second item that you’ll need will be a 3G USB broadband dongle. This will allow you to connect to the Internet anywhere in the country that you can get a 3G mobile phone signal. (If the venue is away from major towns or inside a building it’s worth checking you can get a phone signal before the day of the sale!).

Finally it brings me back to printers. Offering a receipt to customers is courteous, looks professional and printers like the Citizen PD-04 allow you to print via IrDA (Infra Red) from your laptop. As the printers operate by battery you don’t even need a power socket to print professional receipts. They are thermal printers so there’s no ink or toner to worry about – all you need is a roll of thermal paper and remember to charge the battery the day before the show.

Don’t get carried away with technology though, if it’s a sale where the general public attend make sure you remember to take a float of change as it’s more than likely the majority of your customers will trade with cash. However if you’re offering high ticket items for sale ensuring that potential customers can pay on the spot might gain you some extra sales.

If your prefer your buyers not to receive automated reminder emails it’s possible to opt out in your My eBay Preferences leaving you free to send your own payment reminder emails. For those who sell on auctions or who traditionally have customers who take a few days to pay (especially if buyers are paying by cheque and don’t use eBay checkout) then this might be an option worth considering.

Personally I’m going to leave the automated payment requests turned on – I prefer to be paid fast and to ship fast and anything that encourages this is good news as far as I’m concerned, especially as the vast majority of my customers choose to use PayPal.

A recent server update has temporarily disabled the Google Checkout merchant frontend servers. As a result, logging in to your Checkout merchant account now returns a 404 file not found error. Please note that this issue only affects the Google Checkout web interface, all other services are still functioning correctly. This issue does not affect your your user’s experience with Google Checkout or your ability to accept orders and process them via our APIs.

Since yesterday, sellers have been complaining that they were unable to access the admin area for Checkout, which was returning a 404 error. Buyers were still able to place orders and pay using Google Checkout, but merchants could not check order details nor see if the payment had been verified. Most frustrating seems to have been the lack of a quick Google announcement of the reason for the problem, and no phone support for merchants to find information for themselves.

There’s currently no ETA for the fix.

It’s a whole year since PayPal acquired Bill Me Later, and as an eBay company it’s high time it was integrated for eBay payments.

With an APR of 19.99% it’s not an attractive long term finance option, but for US customers who simply want to delay payment until pay day and then clear their balance if full it’s ideal. The minimum finance charge is $2.00.

photo credit: William Hook

Silicon Alley Insider is reporting “Wall Street gossips” saying that Apple are considering extending iTunes so that it can be used on third-party sites as a payment service.

iPhone users can already use iTunes to purchase some virtual and subscription goods in iPhone applications, though that service charges developers 30% of the transaction, so in its current format, it’s not something that retailers of actual goods are going to rush to embrace.

We’ve seen many things touted as “PayPal killers” over the last few years: Google Checkout was going to be the end, so was Amazon Payments. The probable next contender, Facebook payments, is still in alpha testing. But to be a real PayPal killer, any new service would need to offer buyers something that PayPal doesn’t already: the rise and rise of PayPal was, after all, down to eBay buyers demanding to use it. Could Apple bring something new to the table? SAI suggests that

maybe this is Apple’s first step toward becoming a way for people to pay for goods offline. As consumers, we’d love this. No more waiting for the bartender to ring you up!

Paying a bar or restaurant tab by clicking a button on an iphone does sound a lot more attractive than the interminable wait for the bill, I have to admit. Wrong-footing PayPal? – there could be an app for that…

We received an email out of the blue from Paypal on Saturday to let us know that our account that we have held for six years will now be subject to a rolling reserve of 6%. This means that from now on Paypal will deduct 6% of all of payments and hold them on a rolling 6 month basis to protect itself against chargeback’s. [sic] … According to the person I spoke to at Paypal yesterday this is something that is rolling out to ALL Paypal accounts and that we are ‘lucky’ as some people are being charged up to 20% with 10% being the norm. … When I asked why we had not had any notice and when this was announced I was told by the Paypal agent that this was an ongoing process that started at the beginning of the year and that they had 60 million accounts to go through.

We’ve heard from several sellers that the same has happened to them over the last year or two, and PayPal’s user agreement makes provision for putting holds on a proportion of a seller’s account for a number of different reasons, including a couple of cover-all clauses that mean they can instigate a hold if they feel your business is more risky than they’d like. It’s also normal practice for merchant accounts to hold a reserve.

But PayPal doing this to every seller, regardless of the reality of their account, seems drastic: does the support rep have it right? We asked PayPal UK for a comment; here’s what they said:

It’s certainly not true to say that PayPal is holding 20% reserves on all seller accounts.

We only apply reserves to a small proportion of sellers’ accounts, and typically allow these sellers to withdraw 95% of their account balance. The remaining balance is held for a set period of time, usually 60 to 90 days.

Our aim is to protect consumers and PayPal while enabling a flourishing buyer and seller community. The decision to apply a reserve to an account reflects a host of factors, which may include the level of customer complaints and chargebacks, the financial performance of the seller’s business and the amount of information available about the merchant. We also consider other ways of mitigating the risks involved, such as personal, directors’ or bank guarantees, but again it is rare for PayPal to require these. Decisions are taken case by case.

So it’s not going to happen to everybody – but it could still happen to you, and it’s something that every seller needs to consider, and ensure their business and their family could survive.

If you’ve had PayPal put a hold on your account, let us know what happened in the comments.

eBay.com Payments

eBay.com which is now a strictly electronic payment only venue have enabled both Moneybookers and Paymate on the site in addition to PayPal and ProPay.

Paymate is an Australian company, and no stranger to dealing with eBay. They were one of the companies to oppose eBay’s move to go PayPal only in Australia and wrote to the ACCC to complain about the plans which were later dropped.

Moneybookers unique selling point is the number of payment methods they accept, particularly in Europe. They enable payments from 200 countries in 34 currencies, using 50 payment options but with just 1 connection so will appeal to sellers who ship worldwide. In comparison PayPal accept just 18 currencies.

In truth however it’s likely that most buyers on eBay will still want to pay via PayPal so sellers who remove this choice are likely to do themselves a disservice. The good news however is that should your PayPal account ever be limited there are at least viable alternatives for eBay.com.

Amazon Flexible Payments Service (FPS)

Amazon FPS has come out of Beta and as well as announcing it’s availability to all have launched a free payment processing offer for the first 90 days. To qualify you need to register by 15th March 2009, launch your application by 1st June. You’ll then qualify for 90 days of free processing up to a total of $1/2 million turnover.

The big advantage of Amazon FPS is existing Amazon customers will be able to pay using their Amazon user name/password with no additional sign up required. Buyers shipping addresses and payment information already on file with Amazon make this a quick and simple payment system. It’ll be interesting to see how much traction it gains against PayPal in the future.

My first question had to be “Why would anyone pay other than by PayPal on eBay?”. ProPay explained that they can offer a very simple checkout experience where a user can simply enter their card details much as on any other ecommerce site. For first time buyers on eBay that’s a lot simpler than opening a PayPal account and for many of my buyers, who make business purchases, to be able to pay on eBay with a company credit card makes a lot of sense.

Other advantages are ProPay provide sellers with a full merchant account and merchant ID (recognised by the banking industry) the ability to take payments both on and off eBay along with the customer service you’d expect from a merchant provider.

Currently ProPay is currently available on eBay for Silver, Gold, Platinum, and Titanium PowerSellers based in the US and offer an eAuction Account, with an eAuction Pro Account coming early next year.

There is a $24 annual fee for the eAuction Account, which is refunded as a processing credit if more than $3000 is processed in the first six months. The only other fees are the transaction costs which are as low as 2.4%. Transaction costs are not based on the volume of payments (as with PayPal) but on the sellers PowerSeller level making ProPay extremely competitive to use alongside other payment methods.

Added benefits for the eAuction Pro Account will be an online virtual terminal, touch-tone telephone processing, secure email invoices (send an email and the buyer clicks a secure link to make payment), direct API and encrypted ProPay Card Reader. The enables sellers to take payments both on eBay and from other website or off-line payments.

ProPay were pretty honest and up front explaining that the initial integration on eBay wasn’t as smooth as they and eBay would have liked. That’s not surprising as it’s the first time eBay have opened up their checkout for a payment provider other than PayPal. For the future other third party payment providers following in their footsteps should find the integration much easier.

PayPal have had the exclusivity of eBay online payments for many years, although more of their revenues now come from off-eBay transactions than from eBay generated payments. The future will be interesting and anyone that’s had their PayPal account limited will welcome the first approved alternative payment option for trading on eBay.

Next year as well as launching the eAuction Pro accounts, ProPay will make the eAuction Account available to Bronze Power Sellers and later to all eBay sellers. With a track record of handling payments for on and off-line home based businesses ProPay is one option I look forward to seeing in the UK and well worth considering if you’re based in the US.

photo credit: Anh Thai

eBay UK sellers must accept PayPal. It’s the rule. It’s been the rule since 3rd June. And it’s to increase buyer protection and confidence, so that’s alright. Right?

Not quite. Not if you’re one of the really big sellers, whom eBay will keep happy even if it means ploughing up that famous level playing field.

Questioned on the PowerSeller Board about Dell’s lack of a PayPal offering, pink Joe had this to say:

When we made the Paypal change, our seller support teams contacted our largest accounts to discuss this. A very small number of sellers, including Dell, who use a different checkout process were unable to adapt their technologies in time. So we created a new policy such that if a platinum powerseller met certain conditions, we would work with them to migrate their systems. Those conditions include that the seller must offer their own payment protection policies such that buyers have access to the same cover as Paypal would provide and that they migrate quickly. It is that, and not the country, that allows Dell to list without Paypal for a short period of time.

Smaller sellers who want to use their own merchant accounts to process card payments rather than PayPal will be extremely unimpressed with this. As several people have commented on the original thread, not accepting PayPal seems more like to be about “wouldn’t” than “couldn’t” adapt technology. Plenty of other sellers were, after all, expected to change their technologies to ensure that their buyers had PayPal’s protection, and eBay announced the change in March: four months should be long enough for Dell to change a computer system, shouldn’t it?

What’s more, buyers learn that “all eBay UK listings now offer PayPal”. How is it improving the buyer experience if a few of the very largest sellers and the most well-known names are allowed to flout the rule?

Thanks to Whirly for the heads-up.

TipIt’s core service is fairly straightfoward: you put a ‘tip jar’ link on your website; your supporters can tip you tiny or less-tiny amounts of money; when their total tips reach £2/€3/$4, they’re told to pay by PayPal; assuming that they do pay, TipIt take a percentage for processing fees (currently just over 5%), and you get your share of the rest. According to the company, around 70% of tippers make good on their promises: you wouldn’t want to rely on it to pay the mortgage, but it might cover your webhosting.

But TipIt also offers the ability to transfer money via Twitter. Just tweet “d tipit @TARGET AMOUNT MESSAGE”, and you’re back in the same “email to remind you to PayPal” loop. It’s not perfect, far from it, and I’m betting it will be just the first of many such providers, but it has enormous potential.

Via TechCrunch.

The USBSwiper does exactly what it sounds like, it enables you to swipe a credit card in a USB dongle and deposits money into your PayPal account. It works with both PayPal Payments Pro and PayPal PayFlow Pro so functions equally well in the UK and the US.

Rather than typing the details of cards into the virtual terminal it enables the card information to be read by the USBSwiper in the same manner as every cash register up and down the country prior to the introduction of chip and pin.

If, as a seller, you visit tradeshows and want to accept credit cards on the spot for customer orders all you need is your laptop, a WiFi or mobile internet connection and the USBSwiper. In addition it avoids the need for a separate merchant account for accepting credit cards, which is a boon for the small business as the only cost to process the funds are the PayPal charges.

There’s a set up cost of $49.97 (~£25.00) for the hardware and $197.00 (~£100.00) for the software license. From then on the solution costs just $4.95/mth (~£2.50) making ongoing costs negligible.

This really is one of the products sellers have been begging for for years and definitely a point of sale tool that businesses operating primarily online should consider for offline transactions.

Following eBay’s response (and after the deadline for public submissions expired on 3nd May), one more 38 page anonymous report was submitted, which set out in detail why they considered eBay’s move to be anti-competitive.

It didn’t take too long though for one eBay user to expose the culprit, examining the hidden (but easily accessible) meta data of the document he found the phrase “ACCC Submission by Google re eBay”. The document has been replaced with an amended version with Google’s name removed.

This has to be embarrassing for Google, all the major banking institutions that made submissions did so publicly, and it looks much worse have your intentions revealed in this manner than it would do to be up front in the first place.

(Thanks go to Richard for spotting this story)

I was really not sure whether this was a real email or not. So like a good eBayer, I forwarded to spoof@paypal.com. Then I signed in to my PayPal account, and sure enough there was a reversed transaction. Was this a real PayPal email, or just a spooky coincidence? I erred on the side of protecting my PayPal account, and replied to the email with the information requested.

This morning, I had two emails back from PayPal: one from customer support thanking me for the information I’d supplied, and the other from spoof@, thanking me for forwarding the spoof email and confirming it wasn’t genuine.

At this point, I started to wonder whether it was me or PayPal who had gone mad: but Jane the demon bead lady confirmed in our forum that exactly the same thing had happened to her.

I can understand that PayPal might not want to send out confidential financial information in emails, but the above email is completely inadequate. How many sellers are going to see it lacking any kind of credibilty, assume it’s a spoof and delete it, only to have PayPal return the payment to the sender a week later because the seller hasn’t complied with the information request. At the very least, this should say “please sign into your PayPal account and supply us with the information requested through our website”, rather than using email for investigations.

As for spoof@paypal.com, it’s long been my suspicion that they tell us that everything is a spoof, just to be on the safe side. If genuine emails can and are being flagged as phishing, then really what’s the point of having spoof@ at all?

In the meantime, any sellers receiving such an email should sign into their PayPal account to check whether a payment really has been reversed before replying to *or* deleting the email.

1) PayPal only on eBay will not significantly reduce competition in online payments as payments on eBay do not comprise a significant proportion of all online payments and PayPal’s membership base will not increase significantly by making it complusory on eBay. They point out that “eBay buyers and sellers who do not wish to pay PayPal fees are able to avoid doing so by listing and purchasing items through competing services”. An additional point is that buyers still have choice of which underlying payment method to use such as bank transfer, debit card, credit card or PayPal balance.

They quote Oztion’s report that their membership has risen 22% since the PayPal announcement, saying “there is evidence to suggest that a number of sellers will choose alternative sales platforms in response to the implementation of the Project, providing a strong incentive for eBay to maintain a competitive offering”.

2) eBay state that use of PayPal will actually increase protection to users. They say “PayPal users automatically obtain the benefits of the security and protection mechanisms offered through those [credit/debit card, Bank funded] payment methods plus the additional layer of security and protection benefits offered by PayPal.”

eBay also highlight that even their main competitors acknowledge “that the information-sharing between eBay and PayPal gives PayPal an advantage in reversing fraudulent transacfions..” as justification for insisiting on PayPal only.

(3) eBay reject a number of claims made in submissions, such as PayPal is not the largest and longest established online payment provider, PayPal will not become a monopoly for eBay payments, it will merely be an intermediary to process transactions made via other payment institutions, and that they don’t discriminate against high-volume and/or low-margin sellers as they offer micropayments and volume discounts.

eBay’s submission suggests that PayPal will not become an online payment monopoly, and that buyers and sellers have choices of venues to buy and sell on. They insist that payments via PayPal not only offer additional security to alternatives, but enable eBay to protect buyers and sellers from problematic transactions through monitoring buyer and seller behaviour.

In conclusion eBay said changes would not be substantially lessening competition, and in any event, any lessening of competition would be clearly outweighed by the significant public benefits that would be likely to result from it.

The big question is will the ACCC grant eBay’s request to go PayPal only, and if so how long will it be before the policy migrates to other countries around the eBay world?

eBay have said that they have no plans to replicate their Australian PayPal-only policy in the US, but as many eBay-watchers have said, those statements seem to have been very carefully couched in get-out clauses.

A move to all-electronic payments would surely make buying on eBay safer for buyers, though it would also drive away those who don’t have access to credit and debit cards, and those who choose not to use them online. Allowing the use of other payment providers than PayPal might help to convince sellers that this isn’t purely about eBay’s bottom line.

eBay typically only consult users like this when something has been decided and they’re just tweaking the details, so I’ll be expecting an announcement from the US on this before the end of this year.

Many of the submissions are from eBay users complaining that they want choice for eBay payments, and in fact the crux of many complaints is simply that they’ll have to pay PayPal fees on top of their eBay fees. In reality this is a lessor concern for larger businesses trading on eBay as they’ll already be paying banking or merchant account fees for each transaction anyway.

One of the most interesting submissions come yesterday, from the Australian Bankers Association (ABA). It addresses two main points – firstly the exclusion of PayPal’s competitors from a large segment pf the market, i.e. eBay. Currently they state 50% of transactions on eBay’s Australian site occur through PayPal, with the next most popular payment method being bank transfer, followed by cheques and money orders. As in the UK whilst there are alternative payment methods they are either used very rarely or are banned from eBay as an unsafe payment method.

It’s the second point that is most interesting though, the ABA assert that exclusivity on eBay for PayPal will give it a “slingshot” effect and unfair advantage for non-eBay transactions. As buyers will be forced to sign up for a PayPal account when using eBay they’ll naturally then find it more convenient to use PayPal rather than sign up for alternative services in the future.

The ABA state “Even banks, which might otherwise be expected to develop their competing services with comparable features to PayPal may be deterred from doing so”. Once PayPal gains an unassailable market position their market share is predicted to be 65% of all Australian ecommerce transactions, should exclusivity on eBay become ratified.

In conclusion the ABA say “Clearly, the public benefits are exaggerated or illusory” and finish with the warning that PayPal would be “able to increase fees and charges to eBay users.” In reality (for the UK at least) PayPal have lowered fees in recent years, although it’s a legitimate concern.

It’s worth noting that other site with third party sellers such as Amazon have their own exclusive payment method and they too are opening up their payments for off-Amazon transactions. If their off-Amazon business becomes substantial they too could face similar issues in the future.

Whatever the outcome of the ACCA ruling it’s going to an interesting time for the online payment industry.