eBay, threatened by Google Checkout, bans it
eBay banned sellers from requesting payment via Google Checkout yesterday. (See Announcement) On the other hand, a spokesperson for Google said it has no restrictions regarding
marketplace use. "We want to work with everybody," she said.
eBay also renamed its policy from 'eBay's Safe Payments Policy' to 'eBay's Accepted Payments Policy'. Perhaps to add the Google Checkout ban, but to not infer that it wasn't a safe service to use. eBay's Safe Payments policy states that a payment service must have a 'substantial historical track record of providing safe and reliable financial and/or banking related services.', but Google has a long history of successful billing and payment under its AdWords service.
This anti-competitive and wrong in my book. What do you think?
Source: Auctionbytes.com
Comments
I think EBay is scared.
They're also pushing for strict online gambling bans, which seems illogical until you dig deeper. The online gambling industry has spurred the creation of Neteller and other online payment services that EBay sees as competition for PayPal. Therefore, they want to kill online gambling.
The move to block checkout from eBay with Google's payment system is a classic. They are afraid of Google, since Google is smarter. It's smart to look more than one foot in front of one's nose. But most of the people running eBay, like the Pepsi fool who almost sunk Apple, don't really know what that means.
I can speak from personal experience here -- once eBay hired me to be a contractor there, and after I'd given my 2-weeks notice, they backed out of the deal one working day before I was to start! From talking with the recruiters, it was evident that they did this to a several people. They did hire me on six months later, but then only to continue with their shenanigans, reneging on the contract-to-hire since I was a student at the time, and generally squeezing me as much as possible. In the end, they lost the six months of investment it takes in a developer to bring them up to speed on eBay's convoluted code and deployment system.
I don't know if it's intentional or subconcious or inevitable, but it seems that at a certain stage in a tech company's life, the current bankers often send people who are seemingly "chosen" for the fact that they don't look too closely at whatever they're doing to run the company. The fact that those people don't look very deeply at their own work renders them capable of performing a short-term mining operation on the company to deliver cash over to the bankers. This in turn usually ruins or almost ruins the company. I can't imagine this cycle really serves anyone in the end, but it does seem to happen.