What do OZ members think of EBay?

I was the same as you Mick, and then took the cynical view that I'm probably the only person NOT looking at my details on the web - the undersireables seem to find them if they want

I had a friend who found out she was victim of identity theft when the Four Seasons and Shangri-la sent her lots of thankyous and preffered customer deals. Never did online details

Luckily for her the credit card in her name was linked to someone else account, and the liabilty wasn't hers (and she was in another country from the hotel in question so easier to prove)

In the end its risk vs reward - i take teh risk of being ripped uoff for the reward of lazy banking/payments

Well from selling stuff on ebay, I've found that most people pay with paypal anyway, so in practice, I don't really care. . . but in principal I don't agree with the changes. Especially since ebay owns paypal. . . Reeks of conflict of interest to me.

Having a friend bid on stuff to jack up the price is pretty easily caught by eBay. When the same person keeps bidding on another persons stuff, red flags start going up at eBay HQ. If your friend bids up the item and wins it, then you didn't really sell it and you still have to pay the fees. You could file for non paying bidder and get back the final value fee but that would work about once. The other side is that you actually sell the item and you earned the feedback.

If a person were to "hijack someone else's account", I would think the last thing they would do is to up that persons feedback.

Even though you are making a poor argument, I DO understand where you are coming from. Ebay and Paypal are not perfect but then, what is? This is where the intuition and feeling come in, lacking any other hard evidence to support whether the seller is a good one or not.

I think that sums it up Mick.
Ebay are creating a monopoly for themselves, and if you can get away with it, why wouldn't you -

The govt here always says markets must enable fair competition, which under that policy saw me overnight go from getting paid 56c/l to 25c/l for milk - thanks for coming, you get paid 50% now, its fair competition, we'll fly shite in from NZ if we want.

Under the same policy to increase competition, Qantas can't buy the planes of struggling airlines, as it looks like they are trying to buy out the competitor, so the competitor has to go under, and Qantas by riht of being the oldest and biggest gets it near momopoly anyway in teh name of "competition"

Yet they seem to not enforce it sometmes - when Supermarkets wanted to open pharmacies, somehow it was a differnt story. Dont get me started on supermarkets.....

i.e. their policy which should prevent ebay from forcing paypal use, wont, and we'll just have to embrace the outcome regardless

Yeah, that's what has our backs up Solo - very shortly Ebay Australia will not allow the option -only PayPal or cash on pickup will be allowed.

I feel for you milkman. Now milk in the supermarket is in the hands of big suppliers and its pushing $1.50 or so per litre. The farmer ain't getting it, the delivery man ain't getting it, so it can only be the supermarket, eh?
Its like what happened with eggs in South OZ. They deregulated the egg farming biz, the price of eggs fell a long way, egg farms closed down, interstate egg farmers dumped lots of old eggs in the supermarkets, which saw people buying a dozen eggs for a dollar, only to find they were rotten when the got them home. People woke up to the interstate eggs being poor quality, demanded local eggs which were undersupplied, the price of eggs is now cruel. My pensioner mum bought a half dozen eggs the other day, cause my chooks have gone off the lay. They cost her $3!
Of course the price of chook feed is not helping. Wheat is $400 a ton in bulk, so a bag of wheat at the fodder shop is now $21.
Anyway, where was I? Ah yeah, Ebay. The bloody Web equivalent of Woolworths, eh?
Nuff said. Lets talk about motorcycles instead.
Mick

It looks like the accc (i think) has basically told ebay that they wont accept them making paypal the only form of payment.

Another interesting thing to note. I use an ebay sniping site called gixen (check it out it is free and reliable). Sniping is not allowed on ebay germany (where I buy most of my vespa parts) but because gixen makes the bid via ebay usa the sniping is within the rules.

I also sell alot of rare vespa and lambretta stuff, mostly on ebay uk (where most of the buyers are) and when I list it in the uk it still shows up on ebay australia.

So I would suggest that if you listed your parts on US ebay there wouldnt be the paypal only restriction and your stuff would still show up on ebay oz.