USING THE FLIMSY PRETEXT of insecurity, Ebay Australia has announced that as of June, buyers will only be able to pay for their goods via the online commerce website Paypal, which just happens to be owned by the online auction company.

Australians are seething at the decision, which they see as a blatant effort by Ebay to siphon off even more money from user sales, to fill its own fat pockets.

A customer email alert from Ebay to its Australian users warned that as of 21 May, all customers will have to offer Paypal on their listings, in addition to other currently permitted payment methods, but from June 17th, only Paypal or cash on delivery options will be available, meaning that direct deposits, money orders and personal cheques will no longer be accepted.

This will leave a bitter taste in the mouths of Ebay users, as Ebay already takes quite a significant cut on any sale, and Paypal will squeeze a further 1.1 to 2.4 per cent out of them on every sale.

A UK Ebay spokesman, Richard Kanareck, told the INQUIRER that the changes were a way of making transactions more secure, and ensure a safer online marketplace, noting that users who didn’t use Paypal were forgoing the site’s protection and leaving themselves open to being cheated. He denied the fact that it was actually Ebay doing the cheating, by forcing the costly Paypal service onto its customers.

Kanareck insisted Paypal was as competitive as other payment methods and that "most buyers on the Internet expect a certain level of insurance" which Paypal would be able to provide. He used a bizarre analogy, claiming "people wouldn’t walk into a shop and say they were happy to take the risk of being cheated, so why should Ebay allow it?

“It would be remiss of us not to address this issue," said Kanareck.

According to Ebay, customers are four times less likely to have problems in their Ebay transactions if they pay with Paypal, but Kanareck admits that “some people might not be happy about it”, even though he believes that in the long run it “will increase people’s confidence in buying on Ebay”.

In an attempt by the auction website to in some way validate its claims that all this profiteering is actually for the greater consumer good, Ebay has upped its Paypal Buyer Protection insurance programme, in which buyers who don’t get what they ordered, or get goods that were not in the condition they expected, can lodge a claim to eBay for the amount of money they lost. Buyers used to be able to claim up to $3,000, but ebay has now increased this sum to $20,000.

Kanareck said that Australia was the only country where users would be forced to use Paypal only, and that, as far as he knew, no other country was planning on taking payment choices away from its customers in the near future. In the UK , Kanareck said that Paypal already had a very “high penetration level”, whereas in Australia, this wasn’t the case. He noted that as of May, UK Ebay users would also have to list Paypal as a payment method, but could still choose alternative options if they wanted to. µ