Aussies flock off to Ebay rivals over Paypal bias

Rabid roos? 
A stern finger wagging and tsk tsk for abuse of zoonotic facts. AFAIK, rabies virus is absent from Australia fortunately. Plenty of it in the Indonesian archipeligo, but not in Oz - and lots of AQIS folks working hard to keep it that way.

Maybe rabid kangaroos in zoos outside Australia, but then they wouldn't give a stuff about ebay oz.

~ JOIN THE eBay BOYCOTT ~ BE INFORMED ~

Find your State or International Location folder and join us. Former employees are welcome too!

A place to organize.
A place to unite.
A place to focus.
United we stand, Divided we fall. 


http://forums.delphiforums.com/boycottebay
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zs3o3Ed3Rog
http://www.accknowl.com/

Boycott Victoriously … While Making Noise! 
Evacuate by May 1, 2008!


I don't even have a google checkout account, but the monopolies and mergers commissionof every coutry that ebay trade's in should force them to have to accept this method of payment as well. 

So, after Microsoft, and intel, its now ebay, and now google pretty much as well.

Short story, hit em all where it hurts!

big companies invent all kind of nefarious schemes.
I am a buyer on eBay, and the latest changes infuriate me: it is not the requirement for PayPal only for new sellers (this is my preferred method of payment) that bugs me, but the mandatory linking of my PayPal account to my eBay account. 
I don't want to link and leak my personal payPal details to my eBay account, and as a result I can no longer bid on offerings from new sellers. 
Sellers told me that the linking is a new eBay requirement, and my take is that they move fast to unify the commercial with the financial, taking a mandatory cut from each sale or pay.

I am not from Australia, but I do hope that the new Oz alternative will be very successful.

http://www.thesheet.com/nl05_news_selected.php?act=2&stream=1&selkey=6450&hlc=2&hlw=
says
"The ACCC will investigate the decision by eBay Australia to restrict payment methods allowed on the site to PayPal – a payment product owned by eBay – as well as credit cards."

"A spokeswoman for the ACCC said eBay must prove that the public benefit flowing from the move outweighs the public detriment of what seems to fall under the “third line forcing” provisions of the Trade Practices Act."

Hello to Mother England!

I gave eBay 5 good years of my life, they took 10 with all the stress, worry & grief that is a by-product of keeping up with them & their strong-arm tactics i.e. they trebled their fees in '06 & hid shops/stores to boot.

Paypal has illegally "seized" many, many millions $'s from good, honest sellers over buyer's scams & lies. & yet they claim it's safe, pfft I'd rather trust a Cobra, that at least would be predictable!

We Aussie Battlers have had a gutful of them & their greed. They're now going to lose $3k pm in fees & Aussie Post $3k pm in fees from me as a result of this insanity.

With the collective street smarts & business acumen of a gnat, what else could we expect from a bunch of kids at the helm of what could've been a dream for all, now GreedBay is committing corporate suicide that is a pleasure to watch.

How do those mongrels sleep at night?

IF I'M ER SCHLEPPR O' QUAKES!
BE STILLED.

Jeeze he's only been in the chair less than 1 month and already 3 boycotts

What's your next trick JD? You're running out of customers to annoy!

How do you plan to explain this to the stock holders? I hear the Minister of Disinformation from Iraq is unemployed why don't you ring him up and see if he needs a job?

We wish to send those that are standing strong against ebay and Paypal our support from the U.S.!

What they are attempting to do should not be tolerated and we greatly admire those that are standing up for themselves and moving off of the ebay site.


A typical response to the lack of laws in place.

There should be laws in place to (at the very least) prevent any seller selling within Oz from using only one type of payment system. There should always be two or more (three at least in EBay's case) for online sellers; cheque, direct deposit, credit transfer, money order etc...

Oztion, whilst a wonderful site to whom I give full cudos for their guts & tenacity, cannot hope to bring in the same level of revenue for larger eBay sellers which is devastating to us & our ex-buyers.

It's a perfect site for people who enjoy beading, scrap-booking, lower-end clothing & faker than fake handbags but when it comes to trying to build a business that can turn over $20K + per month it is still very much in its infant stage.

The bumbling fools who run eBay know this and they're smug in the belief that they'll lose a few sellers large & small but ultimately the furore will die down & complacency will return ... it probably will & they'll more than recoup their losses as they always do the mongrels :-(

However, until their hideous new death knell payment dictatorship is brought in please continue to sign the petition (buyers & sellers) http://www.petitiononline.com/ebayau/petition.html

and also pray for everyone who enjoys or makes their living on eBay because this will be enforced worldwide evenually - I believe UK is also under fire like us but to a lesser extent.

What's the matter with you people? Don't you realize that eBay has a Fiduciary Responsibility to it's options^H^H^H^H shareholders, to suck the maximum amount of life's blood from your veins?

People signing petitions attacking eBay are e-terrorists! Go back to sleep, now.


Ebay earned the monicker Feebay, long before this latest "improvement".

This new restriction for sellers limiting payment options to Payal, a company owned by Ebay, is a restrictive and un-competitive trade practice and the ACCC should act accordingly to prohibit it.

We'll have to wait and see.


Trademe is more successful than eBay in NZ, so I have faith that Oztion has a strong chance in Australia now.

They need to capitalise on this situation and focus on bringing in buyers otherwise their newly gained ex-eBay sellers (who will bring some buyers with them), just won't be able to stick around long-term.

I loathe monopolies in any arena and I sincerely hope that buyers and sellers will take a stand against this eBay bullying by migrating to Oztion together NOW!


@ Gold Power Seller
Nobody is telling you to move off eBay and certainly not immediately, in a huff. The thing is right now you have all your eggs in one basket and if you trip you will have nothing but a mess.
Take half your listings elsewhere. Getting set up is a pain in the biblical donkey but the sooner you start the quicker it is done.
Establish a presence. Keep your same seller ID so your customers will find you more easily. 
Do not make the mistake so many US sellers did and ramp your off eBay prices up. Then whinge when nothing is selling. Buyers aren't that stupid!
As your sales pick up on your alternate site decrease your eBay listings 5% each week until you are out the door.
I ran a spreadsheet, Oz is paying less now than we are in Paypal %, IF and FVF. Take a look at our fee structure and see the writing on the wall. Somebody has to pay for those executive benefits.
Hold fast Australia! Teach those Yank barstids a good lesson.
www.redinkdiary.blogspot.com

I left Ebay Aus three years ago when they first showed signs of this sort of prescriptive behaviour. They have never listened to the needs and desires of their buyers and sellers and they are not about to now.

Oztion on the other hand is responsive, far less expensive and growing by the minute, a much better option for buyers and sellers alike.

:o) boo512 Oztion member #220

Fear not my english friends you will not be left out, ebay plans on rolling this out worldwide by years end.

I have been a member of Ebay for 6 years and would like to say this is just one more thing we have had to put up with these last few months,first they take away the sellers right to give negative feedback,as from next month they can only give positive,then they decided to make bidder1,Bidder2 etc. which gives a better chance for the seller to shill bid on their own items and now to top it off they have said only Paypal to be used,Aussies have had enough and want to fight this to the bitter end.
Please everyone sign the petition and stand strong with us.

You may all be interested to know that once the Australian "experiment" has been completed this will be rolled out world wide.

From Mr. Donahoe:
Mr. Donahoe said that if the test was successful, the company would introduce it in other countries “in months, not years."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/17/technology/17ebay.html?_r=4&ref=business&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

Hats off to you ,Mother England for doing this article on our pain out here in the colonies :)
Yes,our freedom of choice is being eroded bit by bit and I suspect we here in Oz are but a test case and sooner than later,the rest of eBay globally will be forced into this new policy also.BE ALARMED,VERY ALARMED!

I think the site that has been put together from powerseller feedback www.bang4bucks.com.au will take of as the next best thing, was looking there today and the sellers on there are big proffessional sellers so it wont be as junky as other Aussie sites.
Watch for bang4bucks.com.au

Blog Dated Thursday, January 24, 2008

EBay Completes Transition to Retail Integrator

When people think of eBay, they think of online auctions. But the company has been quietly abandoning the auction business and trying to turn itself into a retail integrator like Buy.com. Now it appears ready to complete that transition with the ouster of longtime CEO Meg Whitman, and her replacement with eBay Marketplaces head John Donahoe.

It’s a sign of how quietly eBay wants to make this move that most press reports about the CEO change don’t mention Donahoe’s title. They don’t want the headlines to be hinting that “Marketplaces” is taking over what used to be an auction company.

Yet this change has been a long time coming. The mere fact that there is no auctions division in eBay shows how little concern they have for what used to be their core business. Two years ago, they launched eBay Express, a trial version of the new eBay in which auctions and most eBay sellers were excluded. Starting around the same time, eBay quietly dumped most of its active auction sellers, apparently more than 100,000 of them (merely “tens of thousands” in the company’s public statements) leaving would-be bidders with nothing to bid on. New, secret rules virtually prohibit small-scale sellers. These “micro-merchants” used to be the heart of eBay, but the new eBay seems to hope to reassure buyers that each of its sellers is an ongoing business at least on the scale of a regular retail shop. Yet with fewer items for sale, the number of buyers on eBay has declined for the first time in its history.

At the same time that discouraged bidders were leaving the site in droves, eBay raised its auction fees and the U.S. postal service drastically raised postage rates for small packages, making it much harder for casual sellers to make any money on auctions. A visit to the eBay site last summer showed that most auction listings failed to get any bids at all, with less than 10 percent attracting the two or more bidders necessary to turn the listing into an auction.

EBay at that point had already turned into a fixed-price listing site. They have since cemented that transition with a web site redesign. Visit eBay today, and there is nothing on the home page to tell you it used to be an auction site. “Shop your Favorite Categories,” it purrs, almost as if it were the online version of JCPenney. “Don’t just shop. Win!” exudes today’s featured promo item. Below that, a smaller promo offers “Free shipping on Valentine’s Day gifts.” You have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page to even find the word “auction” — “Live Auctions” can be found in the middle of the corporate links, between “Jobs” and “Announcements.”



EBay’s search result pages still have tabs that let you choose between “Auctions” and “Buy It Now,” but that too is set to change when the eBay search interface is replaced with the eBay Express search interface in the coming weeks.

If you are a customer, though, your interests are somewhat at odds with eBay’s. EBay hopes you won’t notice that most of the sellers and most of the bargains are gone and that much of what you find on today’s eBay is listed at or close to full retail price. They don’t want you to think of them as a retail integration web site because then you may compare them to a dozen other sites that are more established and may give you a better chance of finding the bargains you are looking for. The longer they can keep you from noticing these things, the more money they can squeeze out of you during this critical transition period for them.

The sad thing about all this is that the world has lost one of its iconic marketplaces. One might have hoped that eBay could find a way to keep its old auction business going. As recently as two years ago, eBay stood for something in terms of buying and selling. It was the “worldwide garage sale,” as one songwriter put it, putting one person’s junk in the hands of someone else who could make use of it. Although Craigslist has picked up a little of the slack, many of these surplus personal and household items will simply be thrown away now.

You might wonder why a company like eBay would undertake such a complete transformation while publicly denying that anything is changing — and why the press would obediently go along with the story. It’s really no mystery. EBay must believe it can make a bigger profit by competing head-on with the likes of Buy.com in the retail integration category. The famous eBay brand would be an advantage in going up against the more established companies it would be competing against. Yet obviously it wants to keep the old business going as long as it can and take as much of the customer base along as it can to give it the best chance of success in its new enterprise. And the press wants eBay to succeed. If you work for the press, your salary comes from advertisers, and there are few advertisers bigger than eBay, so you tend to want them to succeed.

























But the fact that this kind of activity has been taken over by nonprofits and charities suggests that maybe there never really was any profit in it for eBay to begin with. EBay always hinted that it made most of its money from a few thousand dedicated eBay sellers, and if they’ve decided to rebuild their business around those sellers, it might have been the right move in a business sense. And while eBay may never become a match for large-scale retail integrators like Buy.com, at least it will still exist in some form, still pursuing its goal of bringing buyers and sellers together.

Australia, U.K., U.S.A., Germany and ALL, Join together for the World-Wide Ebay Boycott, Beginning May 1st and Beyond! Let Our Voices Be Heard!

Was checking to see what the wizard was up to in the land of Oz and found this revealing article touted as Donahoe's Mien Kampf

http://www.bain.com/bainweb/PDFs/cms/Public/Last_legacy_dotcom_era.pdf

I urge all buyers and sellers on eBay around the world to take a stand against the greed that has set in to eBay' headquarters.

June 1st 2008 is the next worldwide eBay Strike day, join in and let eBay know now before it's too late. In 5 years people will be talking about the site that was "eBay".

eBay! What's eBay?

Make some NOISE!

boycott-ebay.net

eBay introduces absolute anonymity for (shill) bidders

In Australia and the UK (at the least) eBay has now obscured auction bidding to the point that genuine bidders have got absolutely no chance of detecting and thereby protecting themselves from “shill” bidding (a criminal offence in most civilised countries) by unethical vendors. Notwithstanding eBay’s statements to the contrary, this application of absolute anonymity by eBay serves no purpose other than to deceive consumers; and the same criticism has always applied to eBay’s other facility, “User ID kept private” (aka “the shill bidders’ stairway to paradise”). Again, notwithstanding eBay’s various pronouncements about shill bidding being banned on eBay, eBay is now knowingly “aiding and abetting” such shill bidders, at the expense of consumers ...

A lengthy detailed critical analysis of this matter at:
http://www.auctionbytes.com/forum/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=6498345#6498345

I apologise in advance for the length of the above-linked comment. If you are an unethical shill-bidding seller or a buyer who lives in Australia, the UK, Ireland or the Philippines and you are not concerned that, on these sites, eBay is effectively (and knowingly) “aiding and abetting” such shill-bidding sellers to cheat you, read no further.