I think its gonna be +PayPal, But I see the possibility of reducing fraud.

Most of the fun for me on e-bay is bidding and getting a lower price. Fixed prices? I can go anywhere to buy something for a fixed price (except for old shoes and clothes) :)

The whole thing with people wanting a check or money order is one of those red flags that makes you think there might be something not kosher about the thing.
On the other hand, they'll gouge everybody with PayPal fees.

@Triborough: true about paypal fees....

i dunno, i've sold stuff and bought stuff on eBay.... tend to like to sell stuf as BIN with Offer PRice

@akronharry: If eBay switches to mostly fixed price sales, it will probably wound the golden goose.

eBay has been going to list fixed-price for quite a while, but I still think it's the auctions that drive the interest in eBay. PayPal is nowhere near as safe for buyers as using a standard credit card. So if you're going to buy something off eBay you can buy anywhere else for the same fixed price, you'd be better off just avoiding eBay. Of course, eBay will still be the best place to buy (knowingly or unknowingly) counterfeit Tiffany jewelry, Rolex watches, Prada bags, and autographs.

As a seller we got screwed by Paypal a couple of times. Scammy buyers who had the product and wanted both the product and their money back without a legit damage/not as described issue. As a buyer I had a not as described item. I just wanted to return it and get a refund. Paypal told me to keep it and took the sellers money back and gave it to me. I technically benefitted but still found this really wrong.

As Ebay discontinued other payment options we quit listing with them. If they cut auctions I see no benefit to ever using them again.

@bohemian: and that is why i canceled my papal account of 5 years.

What's out there besides e-bay that may be worth a look?

Well atleast I can still pay for my porn and cars on ebay with cash or money orders, thank god for that! lol. Seriously though it doesn't bother me they are going to all electronic payments, although paying paypal fees, listing fees and final value fees is a bit much. They really should just eliminate the paypal fees all together.

This isn't meant to reduce "fraud", it is meant to nickel and dime the seller to death.

@Triborough:

"...people wanting a check or money order is one of those red flags..."

Yeah, I got ripped off after sending a postal money order for an item I won. No communication from the seller, no help from eBay, and no help from the "Postal Inspectors."

@akronharry: Unfortunately just craigslist really, but that is really hit and miss.

I don't buy/sell much on eBay lately. The selling fees are way high and then if the buyer uses a CC on PayPal I get stuck for more fees. I'll use Craigslist since it's free.

eBay has become a giant, cumbersome e-retailer. Actual bidding and occasional rare scores are long gone thanks to bid sniping, and too many power users just use it to parcel out bulk purchases.

What was once the world's most convenient garage sale has turned into a warehouse led by those with the most shelves and biggest display cases.

This pretty-much-PayPal-only thing is just absurd. For how long would we shop at Target if they only accepted their gift cards or credit accounts?

You know, I've gotten so tired of eBay and their ever changing policies and attempts to "prevent fraud" by pushing into people's business that I'd rather give things away than have somebody pay me for them.

How depressing is that? They've outgrown their usefulness so far that I would rather lose money than use them.

Hmm, I'm pretty fanatical about paying with money orders because Paypal's service is so shitty. Working to get fraud resolved with them is a ridiculous nightmare. This sounds to me like they're trying to get a bigger take of the auction transactions by muscling their users into using their service.

I have been weaning myself off Ebay for a while now and this is just the final push that I have needed to go cold turkey. PayPal is not an option. It screws both buyers and sellers and is nothing more than a way for Ebay to have all of the power in a transaction with none of the responsibility.

That said,it's hard for me to see how this passes anti trust muster.

I have written many times that the Ebay of today will not be the Ebay that we know 5 years from now. This just knd of confirms that...

Just another way for FEEbay to price gouge you and take all your profits. FEEbay has abandoned us years ago, having forgotten who made them. Corporate greed, nothing more, nothing less. Unfortunately for them, I abandoned them years ago, and now do business on a number of alternative auction sites (and there are plenty of them out there). I use www.alsoshop.com and have not looked back ever since. The only way for you to have input and smack FEEbay for giving you the shaft is to do the same.

Ebay is nowhere near what it once was. High fees. Lots of scams, almost zero protection. I went from an avid ebayer to someone who will never use them again.

fixed prices and lousy protection means I will choose to shop at one of the many thousands of other online stores.

Can some one say "Sherman Anti-Trust"?

@johnfrombrooklyn: Please explain your remark, "PayPal is nowhere near as safe for buyers as using a standard credit card."

I use a CC via Paypal (not the direct withdrawal option) as a buyer at eBay and elsewhere on the web. You're saying this is unsafe? ..... Thanks

My brother sells on eBay and he tells me that the winner is always eBay. They take a good 10% or more off his auctions on average between them and Paypal.

Seriously, I smell anti-trust.

Ebay isn't actually "banning" money orders and checks, they just won't let sellers solicit them on their listings. If a bidder wins and asks to pay via Money Order or Check, that is acceptable.

However, Ebay is supposedly going to monitor sellers and if they accept more than a certain percentage (a believe it is 5%) of payments via non digital payment methods, there will be consequences imposed on the seller.

Either way, this just pushes me to finish doing business on Ebay by October 1st. Before I was just taking my time and not worrying about a deadline.

Dang this really sucks. I don't understand how a Money Order can be fraudulent, unless it's a fake Money Order to begin with. You cash it and that's all there is to it. I loathe PayPal and using them essentially doubles the fees I pay out for a sale. I really see this as a move to increase the money that eBay can collect in these fees.

I only use eBay for unique, one-off items (like antique items, memorabilia, etc). Fixed price does *not* work for these types of items. Many of the people who sell those kinds of items are not professionals, but just folks selling their old stuff. Many of them have been ripped of by PayPal, and only take checks and MO. I have never had a problem buying from people who prefer paper payment. I think they should make this a switchable setting, and just block paper payment for those sellers who have demonstrated issues using it.

I've stopped selling on eBay, it's too hard to do and the benefits are less.

But I would never accept money orders or checks anyway. I don't with Craigslist either. Too many scammers use money orders particularly.

Unfortunately, I think that only plays a small part in eBays decision.

@gandalf88: "If a bidder wins and asks to pay via Money Order or Check, that is acceptable."

That's only true if you pick the item up in person.

@Mollyg:

Can some one say "Sherman Anti-Trust"?

Actually the Aussies (God bless 'em) already did. When Ebay tried to ram this through down under, the Australian Corporation Commission said hell,no, mate. That's because it clearly is an attempt for two of three parties (Ebay and the seller) to conspire against the interests of the third (the buyer). I really,really hope that this sees a U.S. courtroom...

@WhirlyBird: Actually, they've admitted that they aren't really going to try to police that. They are only going to be watching what percentage of a sellers listings are paid for by non digital payments.

I used to love eBay so much.

Now I play the same mental game I do when anyone mentions Michael Jackson, who I pretend died when his hair caught fire shooting the Pepsi commercial.

That way, I can cherish the good memories without having to acknowledge the present horror.

I've about had it with Ebay. After 10 years of good sales they have managed to destroy all the business I've had on their site. As for this:

"Clearly there's a strong buyer preference for fixed price," said Lorrie Norrington, president of eBay Marketplace, which includes the eBay site."

What a joke...yeah 57 percent of sales on Ebay is thru AUCTIONS - the figures don't lie. Ebay, in its obsession to become Amazon is killing off its own business. What a woefully mismanaged company. What a shame for the thousands of good sellers who have been pushed out while the maniacal Ebay "distruptive innovation" team takes apart something that was once great and beats it into something that is barely mediochre!

As for no longer accepting checks and moneyorders....a lot of my customers were the elderly or the lower income folks who either don't have credit and save for what they buy or they do not trust putting their credit information on the internet. These people will now go elsewhere. (In my 10 years of selling on Ebay I only had one check bounce!) In this move ebay does two things 1) captures every available fee from sellers for the use of Paypal; and 2) gets ready to COLLECT all sales money and then dole it out to sellers once it is satisfied the transaction is complete to everyone's satisfaction. In this way Ebay will "guarrantee" the buyer's purchase! I clearly see that one coming and all other sellers need to see it too.

I'm a sometimes eBay seller. I'm not thrilled about this, or many of the other recent changes eBay has made (the new feedback system with the star ratings, sellers not being able to leave negative or neutral feedback, the constant harping about shipping charges).

I seldom have buyers who want to pay with cashier's check or money order - maybe 5%. Still, if those people don't want to use a credit card or sign up for a paypal account, I'd hate to lose them as bidders - and thus sell the item at a lower price - because eBay won't let them pay the way they prefer to. It is also nice not to have to give paypal their 3% with a cashier's check or money order.

I've had deadbeat bidders promise to send a money order and never pay, but I've also had deadbeats who say they will paypal me the money in a few days and never do.

Then they had better stop with this double dipping bullshit. If I'm a seller, I get dinged for a fee based on the final sale price of the item and dinged again for a "processing fee" when I ask for a check from PayPal. Since eBay and PayPal are the same damn company, there's really no excuse for this.
Actually, throw in the listing fee and they're triple dipping.

Yup, eBay is over. Craigslist is teh new hotness.

@usa_gatekeeper: Once you get defrauded by someone through paypal you will find the paypal protection is about as worthless as a sack of wet mice. Through my experiances (2) paypal was absolutely useless in getting my money back.

I think I'm just done using eBay. Haven't bought anything on there in a year and I can safely say I'm not missing it.

Ebay has become a cesspool of scammers, bulk sellers& worthless overpriced junk. I used to be able to find nice deals, but now, every search yields 5 sponsor listings on top, about 3 pages of bulk merchants, and hidden somewhere on the fourth page, I start finding what I was looking for in the first place. And this was 2 years ago when I used the darn thing for the last time...

I know the bad deals I've had in the past have all revolved around deals that were not electronic in nature. People claim to send a check of MO and weeks later I don't get it - they claim it must have been lost in the mail and they'll send another...blah, blah, blah.

I don't like the idea of fixed price selling, but now anything I sell on eBay is PayPal only.

Ebay just wants to double dip on the fees. The fraud excuse (if you even believe the statistics) is just a smokescreen.

They keep getting worse and worse. I'd rather sell on craigslist or amazon marketplace now.

@usa_gatekeeper: I think he was referring to if you used direct withdrawl with PayPal instead of a CC on Paypal.

@Mollyg:

I sure hope someone does. Ebay is dominating everywhere. I am a season ticket holder for a baseball team and MLB now exclusively deals with Stubhub (owned by EBAY) for its aftermarket ticket sales. They charge an exhorbitant shipping charge, and high percentage to sell through them, and if you don't accept payment for your sold tickets through paypal, they take about 25 days to send you a check.

I used to sell stuff on ebay, but more and more they are getting rediculous about fees and how feedback is recorded etc. The next thing is that they are limiting the amount someone can charge for shipping books, cds, and dvds. So you can only charge $4 to ship a book, even if its a 5 pound coffee table book.

last time i looked at a dollar it said "public tender for all debts public and private" why does everyone hate on the dollar?

@Froggmann:
x2. Paypal "Seller Protection" is a lie. They only want their cut, they don't care about the transaction or providing a quality service.

@theblackdog: Thanks. Direct withdrawal via PayPal is an option I never use anyway.

This is classic, eBay resorting to credit cards and their own product for the only measures for auction fulfillment?

I understand the reasoning for utilizing major credit cards over traditional forms of 'paper' payments, because it makes good business sense, but using their own product at the exclusion of competing products smacks of being anti-competitive. I personally bill my clients via CurdBee for consulting fees, and offer all my clients Paypal, Google Checkout, or standard credit card payments.

One of the biggest problem with using PayPal exclusively for eBay auctions, is that for certain items sold they place a hold on the funds transferred to the seller within PayPal as a security measure, these include the buyers payment for shipping. This may not be a big deal for larger merchants, but for the individual selling his personal goods, listing just 6 or 7 auctions a year, it can become a real pain.

This caveat caught me this week; I sold a spare Dell laptop for $400.00, with an extra $40 for shipping, yet PayPal is holding all the funds to protect the buyer. My problem is that this policy doesn't offer protection for the seller! What is to prevent the buyer from taking delivery, and then doing a charge back. In this situation, I would be out $440.00 as the seller; $400 paid for the laptop,$40.00 paid for shipping (I actually paid a lot more because eBay's UPS wizard is notorious for under-estimating shipping cost), and I no longer have the laptop. My only recourse is at the whim of an eBay/PayPal investigation, that can last weeks, and in the end I may or may not be SOL.

At this point Junk Bonds from the eighties are looking pretty secure.

To compound the issue, I IM'ed eBay and asked if at least the funds for shipping could be released as a mitigating point... that way I wasn't putting out cash that was already banked... her answer was to suggest that if the seller were to leave me positive feedback, it would then in turn release the funds on hold at PayPal, and then I could ship it to him. WHAT??? I don't consider myself a "boyscout", but that's patently unethical and fraudulent.

So what did I do, I shipped the laptop on faith because the more I thought about it, it wasn't the the buyers personal policy, he probably didn't even know it existed, much as I was unaware, it's eBay forcing this circumstance, and it's unfortunate because after this I will no longer trade on eBay.

Sad really, because conceptually, I liked eBay.

CraigsList, you got my business, don't ruin it.

@harvey_birdman_attorney_at_law: I got scammed $600 on ebay and paypal finally compensated me after 5 phone call and talking to a manager. At first they refused because they require tracking and tracking cost over $100 for out of country. I think they took the loss.

There was few other times I got my $ back.

eBay has sucked for a while now. When all the "professional" sellers started posting things up, you couldn't get a good deal anymore. It's all new, cheap crap now it seems. What happened to regular Joe trying to clean out his garage?

We are a fixed price Silver Powerseller on e-bay and have been so for a little more than a year. Our DSR's are closing in on 5.0 and our feedback is at 100% with almost 1200.

Our little store (http:www.nativeamericanfabrics.com) sells fabrics which are owned by a variety of Native American women through out the USA in an attempt to help them establish their own businesses. E-bay offers every store an incentive if people come into your store via another link and makes purchase.

Recently, the Seller Development group at e-bay contacted me by telephone to go over this specific change, as well as a few of the other changes in place.

Our store will no longer be able to "advertise" that we take postal money orders, checks or cash; however, if the Buyer contacts us and request that they are allowed to do this, we will be able to grant them their request. Perhaps 10% of our buyers use those methods to pay, as for the most part, they are on the PowWow highway.

Regarding the new fee structure for fixed price items, we try to keep as much as possible within our store as store inventory, and then too, in order to draw more people into the store, list outside of the inventory in the area that comes up first when you do a common search for cotton or upholstery fabrics. Those we list into the Yardsale or Fleamarket section have been costing our little non-profit group approximately 600.00 per month or 4.50 per listing plus FVF's; while the inventory items are listed at .02-.03 per month. To have the $4.50 drop to .35 per listing will create a great advantage for us.

When you see our fabrics, you can type in any keyword into the e-bay search and find others selling the same item for more than twice the amount and plenty of times the price is the same, but in the fine print you realize that you are only purchasing 1/2 a yard instead of a yard of fabric.

Because of the structure we have in order to sale fabric through and for our group, we are limited in earning power. So the only complaint we have with e-bay is that the final value fee's will receive a discount if we offer free shipping across the board. We will not be able to do that.

Craigslist rocks.

"Starting this fall, we're moving to an electronic checkout process that's faster and more monopolistic for sellers and buyers."

Fixed.

Honestly, eBay has turned into the Detroit of online shopping. A dilapidated wasteland. Ads every f*ckin' where. Fee hikes. The inability to leave negative feedback as a seller (that one pisses me off the most as a long time eBay seller). Moving towards fixed price "auctions" as the norm.

Now I will have to use scampal? F*ck that. Their largely retarded CSR's have been all but useless in my experience and their dispute process is a total crap shoot. On top of that, there is literally no protection for the seller. I've already stopped selling on eBay. Now I may stop buying. What a shame too. In just 10 years they went from one of the greatest places to visit on the web to shitsville where you can buy all the Chinese knockoff crap you want with "Buy it Now".