Ebay and PayPal - The unholy alliance

I doubt that what eBay's doing is fraudulent, but in my view the tight integration of PayPal into eBay probably is anti-competitive. I see this as something similar to Microsoft's bundling of IE with its operating systems, something which I believe they were later stopped from doing.

The recent banning of surcharges was almost certainly primarily aimed at protecting PayPal's revenues, not the interests of eBay buyers, which was how it was presented.

Unfortunately because its free of charge to the buyer, PayPal will always be more attractive to buyers than sellers, who just end up picking up the (not inconsiderable) costs.

For UK transactions FastPay is as good if not better than PayPal, but it's almost impossible to get buyers to use it, because it costs them 20p (less than the cost to post a cheque!)

David

If it makes you feel any better, Attila, I have $110 trapped in a Paypal account. How?
i. the account is unverfied and at its limit, so although the money is mine, I can't send it to another account or withdraw it without verifying that accout first.
ii. I can't verify the account because I have only one bank account, and I used it to verify another Paypal account (don't ask why I have two of these...).

I've contacted Paypal about this twice; each time they told me how sorry they are and how frustrated I must feel, and then passed me off to someone else to solve the problem. (Finally someone from PP has promised to contact me about this.)

I'm sure it will get resolved, but it's a slightly comical situation.