I am very sure (although I haven’t looked at Google’s financials yet) that Google Checkout doesn’t come anywhere near that amount!

I don’t think there’s really a call for a “free market”. Let’s look at the reality of it. eBay is a private marketplace, they’re not claiming to be a Nasdaq where almost anyone in the world can buy and sell shares on the exchange.

If you’re going to play on eBay, you have to follow their rules. If you don’t like the payment processor, then leave. But eBay owns the auction market, just like Amazon owns the book market.

You either play by the rules of the game, or you find your own alternative.

There was a recent bout of “Google vs eBay” recently. Did you catch that post listed in my Speedlinking series?

It just feels like and likely rightly so, since the bulk of eBay’s payment services is geared towards auction payment and settlement, there aren’t many staff who are geared towards the complexities of dealing with something like the 7Dollar script or payment issues outside of a winning auction bid.

I was at an eBay Explained event, where PayPal’s Asia-Pacific head was present, I could sense that she was generally interested to help, but was not familiar with the mechanics of Internet Marketing.

Perhaps they ought to set up a feedback panel or focus group in order to better understand the industry and see that we’re more than the make money quick/ponzi group that we ALL seem to be.

When Google checkout came out I started to add the payment option to my ebay listings - I had only TYPED the word google in the first item’s description when the ebay page flashed up a warning that it was not an “accepted” payment procedure and listings with it mentioned would be removed and accounts may be frozen/suspended!!

What movement is there for a free market and alternative payment processors when one of the big players effectively freezes out all competition to their ‘tame’ payment processor that brings in so much revenue to their ‘group?’

PayPal has to deal with fraud, but it seems they are not that proactive at picking it up. The standard answer is to either allow a charge back or lock the accounts involved for some undisclosed amount of time.