Just made my first sale on eBay. I was actually fairly impressed with the process until I found this little tidbit out. Let me explain first:
*Listed the item and said I wanted to be paid only by PayPal. The way I understood Paypal is, I have a paypal account (tied to one or more of my credit cards and bank accounts), and you have a similar one. You ‘pay’ with your paypal account. The money goes from your paypal account to mine. Simple and easy, a neat electronic way for individuals to exchange money online. How each of us put money in or take money out of our paypal accounts is up to us (transfer from bank account, ‘charge’ an amount to a credit card, etc.)
*A person bought the item (our old camera) and I shipped it Monday.
*I go to ‘claim’ the paypal payment and it says “This is a credit card payment. You’ll have to upgrade (i.e. pay for) your Paypal account, oh, and we’ll need to take this fee and that fee and this fee out of your payment”.
*So I contact eBay going “WTF?” and they say “Well, the checkbox on the listing page that says “accept paypal” has Visa/Mastercard logos next to it. That means you accept those as well and you agree to upgrade your account on Paypal to pay to accept those types of payments. If you don’t want to accept credit cards (get this) you have to type into your item’s description “I don’t accept credit cards” (and even then, the system doesn’t check, so you can still have a winner pay with credit card, and you have to then contact them and ask them to pay another way)
Is that not total BS? I’ll probably just end up sucking it up and ‘upgrading’ my paypal account and paying the few bucks in fees, but it’s completely turned me off of eBay.
So how much will it cost us?
February 22, 2005 @ 9:48 amI happen to have a PayPal account, but I don’t think I’ve ever had to pay for it. Maybe I’ve just been using it long enough. I used to pay rent to Mike & Tim via PayPal.
Just check your options thoroughly before you send the bastards money.
February 22, 2005 @ 7:58 pmI think even using the PayPal service incurs a small fee (will need to check). They (PayPal, which is an eBay company) have been changing their services etc over the last year or so, and with that, fee restructuring.
Compared to getting a merchant account elsewhere, PayPal – for all of it’s annoyances – is still a great solution for a lot of people
Just my bit.
Oh, sorry about the stuff up
February 22, 2005 @ 8:49 pmPaypal (and eBay) are cool. I’ve calmed down since I posted
Turns out you can upgrade your account for free (basically I think they want everyone to have the upgraded account, they just want to make sure you read all the fine print or they would have just upgraded everyone). The transaction only costs a small percent. Annoying, but like you said its much cheaper to accept credit cards this way than any other way.
February 23, 2005 @ 9:41 amI hate EBAY. Damned fu**ing scumbags! I have a dispute with BARGAINDEPOT04 over a one cent item. I bid on the item and made the mistake of not looking at the payment options. I can only pay with paypal. I won the item for a penny and noticed they only accept credit cards. I wrote the seller threre times apologizing for my mistake and yet, the moron filed an unpaid item thing and my account gets cancelled.
What a bunch of crap. I have bought 12 items on EBAY in less than two weeks and paid for them all, usually on the same day. That doesn’t matter to the good Nazis at Ebay. Oh no! One complaint about not paying and they cancel my account? But the seller, oh, he’s got 276 complaints in less than a month. And over 2000 in three years. He’s ok. They don’t bother with his account. He makes them money. Me, I bid on a one penny item.
You can see who EBAY sides with. The people who make them money. Therefore, their rules and policies are a load of dog s*** on a sharp stick!
And, to try and be a good little member of the EBAY community, I spent several hours looking for bootleg and pirated items in the DVD and CD section. I turned in 300 people. I’m doing their damned job for them. Maybe that’s bad, but if you were the artist, you’d like someone in your corner. But the ads and the sellers are STILL THERE. What good does it doo to go with their fake and bootleg and pirate recordings policy? It’s about money, folks. OH, they can kill an ad for a penis pump or a dog’s pickled bladdar, but when it comes to The Beatles Lost Recordings on Pear Records, they are blind, deaf, and totally dumb! People hate getting ripped off. Arlo Guthrie deserves his royalties. The Beatles deserve their royalties and have the right to release what they want to and when. It’s not up to some jack off in Germany. But does EBAY remember all that hard work? Do they even care? No, they’re a bunch of little snotty little hogs rooting around in the grass for lost spare change.
December 18, 2005 @ 1:26 pm