Ebay scraps Paypal-only plan in Australia

Ebay has dropped its proposal to move to a PayPal only system in this country, causing a collective sigh of relief amongst concerned Australians.

The backflip follows a conference help last week by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) on the company's plans to only accept PayPal on the site.

Ebay had argued that its Paypal system of online payments is more secure than other methods, and would reduce fraud.

Personally, while it seems most of the arguments at the ACCC conference were concerned with the extra fees that Paypal incurs, I think their basic premise is also unreasonable.

I don't know anyone who's ever managed to get a refund from Paypal, yet my list of friends who have had grievances with them is as long as my arm. While none of us have experienced any security breaches like hacking or theft, a total of eight inluding myself have experienced fraud and none of us have been covered by Paypal.

The reason many of us chose to pay using Paypal at all is because of the claims on the Ebay website that you are 'covered' if your product doesn't arrive. Despite these guarantees, in the last eighteen months none of us were able to get a refund from Paypal when products did not arrive from a clearly dodgy seller. This sours not just our experience of Paypal but the whole of Ebay.

So when Paypal doesn't deliver on the only reason people want to use it anyway, it's fair enough that the public react when Ebay suggested they were making it the only available payment option. Let's just be glad that people power has won in this case!