“ACCC undermining consumer safety” LOL They can’t be serious? If so….its downright funny. I don’t believe there’s a man, woman or child on the face of the earth (outside of ebay management) who believes that! Get real Ebay – you really ARE acting like an 11 year old these days!

eBay purchases have been known to be disqualified from protection under certain payment conditions beyond the buyer’s control.

I distinctly remember a long (and deleted) conversation on one of the eBay boards about this same kind of coverage denial that was occurring to buyers who purchased on eBay from an isoldit! seller in the midwest.

I think it was the first time many eBay users learned that just because you buy on eBay and use paypal, your purchase may not be protected by the policies designed to do so.

It essentially consists of “Well, we’ll give it a shot”, which is a nicer way of saying “Sorry buddy, you’re out of luck”. It’s defined in the user agreement as a “best efforts” attempt to recoup funds in a failed sale.

As I’m sure that particular buyer is now painfully aware, never never never use anything other than a credit card to pay for transactions on the internet.

It’s the only payment method covered by consumer protection laws.

a powerseller purchased some items, but the seller never sent the items. Apparently this seller had several victims amounting to over 1000 dollars. Today she received the notice of resolution from paypal.

I think this is highly relevant to this topic.

We have decided in your favor, however, we were unable to recover any funds
from the seller’s account. As stated in the PayPal User Agreement, recovery
of funds associated with a Buyer Complaint cannot be guaranteed.

Please know that we will make our best effort to recover the funds in
question if they become available in the seller’s account in the future and
will take appropriate action against the seller. Such action may include
issuing a warning, a temporary restriction, or terminating the account.
Keep in mind that PayPal uses a number of factors to determine when to take
action, including member complaints. Due to privacy laws, we cannot discuss
the details of any action taken. We hope you understand our policy and that
it assures you that you are safe using PayPal.

Now, can anyone tell me WHERE IS THE PROTECTION HERE??
I am SOL with no reimbursement from “buyer protection”.
This means any of us could open an ebay account with bogus info, which was the case with my seller, sell the hell out of some expensive jewelry, pull the money from my account, and voila, disappear!
Then I can do it again, and again, etc.
This jackass loser got close to 1,000.00 from trusting ebayers.
A few that responded to my post, said paypal will refund the money even if the seller had no funds to cover it were unfortunately, mistaken.

seems a bit much for eBay to claim paypal provides the best and safest buyer protection. As many of the responders to this post who have experienced the same with paypal, the best protection is to make purchases with your credit card not paypal balance or bank account.

Interestingly this also goes back to my pointing out that paypal actually encourages buyers to purchase with their credit card so they can do a chargeback when paypal fails to follow through on their end of the contract.

It’s no longer the ’safe payments’ policy, it’s now the ‘accepted payments’ policy (no doubt upon the advice of the eBay Legal team…)

I’d really like to see the blog address a thorny question–Why is Google Payments considered by eBay to be unsafe? That is, any less safe than merchant accounts? How could this competing payment system be made “safer?” I don’t care about the “safeness” aspect to eBay’s bottom line, which appears to be the exclusionary factor for CGO’s product on eBay (unless you are Buy, of course).

Hats off to the Aussies in recognizing the buyers’ freedom to decide which payment system fits their needs best, and to a lesser extent the sellers’. I fully agree with the ACCC’s opinion, as they spoke more honestly about aspects of Paypal than eBay ever has.

I wonder what the impact of actually having functional customer service would have had on the ACCC’s decision?

As for feature plus listings….its good to know that whatever your rating and elevation in the listings you can still buy your way to the top ;-) LOL