eBay Strategies: The "accepted payments" Circus Continues...

As first reported here at eBay Strategies, due to Google Checkout (not a payment system), eBay recently changed their "safe payments" policy. First they renamed it to the more PC "accepted payments" policy (we wouldn't want to imply they are not safe). Then they added a ton of new items to the unaccepted list in addition to Google Checkout.

In their rush to add more unaccepted payment types, Trust and Safety really flubbed a couple of things:

1. They added a new "not allowed" payment type called: Scripophily. The CEO of Scripophily, Bob Kerstein, emailed me about this as it has been very rough on their company to have it implied they are fraudulent. He said: "Our company, Scripophily.com, buys and sells collectible stock and bond certificates and have no idea why eBay listed our company here. If we sell something on eBay, we accept credit cards over the phone, checks, Paypal and credit cards on our website, that's it. Why in the world they listed us here is beyond me. They never notified us about any of this. Their arrogance and paranoid behavior is beyond belief."

Scripophily is a ChannelAdvisor customer, where I am CEO and has a near flawless reputation on eBay and the web. Clearly a great merchant and an asset to eBay (Meg has evidently bought from them) who unfortunately somehow ended up getting thrown under the bus by someone at Trust and Safety that couldn't tell a payment system from one of their own sellers.

Note to Trust and Safety, for future vetting of rogue payment systems, please follow these six easy steps:

1. www.ebay.com
2. Go to advanced search
3. Click on "items by seller" on the left
4. Type in the name of the potentially evil payment system (example: scripophily.com)
5. If a list of auctions comes up, this is an eBay seller (aka customer) and NOT a fraudulent payment system.
6. If a list of auctions does not come up, you are free and clear to add the system to the "evil" list.

AuctionBytes has a great article on this as well.

2. In the UK, eBay also rushed out changes to the policy and added "nochex" to the unapproved/evil list. This payment system is evidently 6yrs old and and extremely popular in the UK where Paypal is relatively new. They are basically a credit card gateway (much like Google Checkout I might add) The Register has two excellent articles on the topic:

Powersellers slam eBay ... - eBay nuked nochex and sellers in the UK were feverishly working on removing it as an option in their listings so they wouldn't get yanked or worst the seller NARUd. eBay relented and gave sellers till Aug 21 to remove the evil payment method.
eBay restores nochex - eBay realized the glitch and now it is approved. So if you're a seller, you are now adding nochex BACK to your listings.

(Note to UK Trust and Safety: Before adding something to the not-accepted list, you should follow these easy steps:

1. go to www.ebay.co.uk
2. click "advanced search"
3. Enter the name of the potentially evil payment service (e.g. "nochex")
4. Be sure to click on the "search title and description" box.
5. Look at the results.

If there are say 500k-1m listings with this payment system, you may want to call someone and make 100% sure you want to ban this. Figure you will impact 1-3k sellers per 100k in listings you are touching. (example - 500k listings = 5k-15k sellers). These are your customers so you want to make their life easier and not harder by randomly adding a very old and popular payment system to the banned list.)

Why on earth would they do this kind of random behavior? I think Bob@Scripophily says it best: "It certainly looks like they just added other companies to the list so Google wouldn't look like they were being singled out."

FREEBIE ALERT: Post as a comment your best shot at a caption for the lead-in picture of this post and I'll be picking the best 2-3 to receive some gratis ChannelAdvisor goodies and a copy of the eBay Strategies book.

P.S. If you've been following the eBay accepted payment policy, you'll know that my personal favorite ACCEPTED payment mechanism is Canadian Tire Money. Let's try the "nochex" test on this puppy for ebay.ca. A search yields for me 270 listings that have canadian tire money. If you look at all of these (which is easily done because there's only 270 of them). They are in three categories: crafts, collectables, home and garden. All of the craft items are listed by one seller who jokes about it as a payment method. Most of the collectable items, are, well, people selling Canadian Tire Money and last but not least the home and garden results seem to be a bug in the search engine.

So you have literally 1-2 sellers taking this approved payment method.