Perfect Pieces Specialists in British Pottery

eBay Australia’s attempt to ban all payment methods other than PayPal and cash has attracted hundred of written complaints to the Australian Competition Commission and Consumer Commission, which is considering the fairness of the proposed policy. The ACCC has promised to make a ruling on the planned change before it’s due to go live in June.

One of the complainants, however, has turned out to be a rather large company that’s worried about the prospects for its own payment processing system. Google has not yet launched Google Checkout in Australia but is likely to do so eventually and sees an eBay ban on its system as anti-competitive and a thorough pain in the neck.

Google’s submission to the ACCC was meant to be kept anonymous but was not – witness this article on the Auctionbytes website.

Following on from my recent post about eBay Australia forcing its users to use PayPal, it seems that eBay’s users aren’t the only people who are unhappy about this decision.

eBay Australia is being investigated by the Australian Competition Commission to see if it is abusing its near-monopoly position in the online auction market to gain an unfair advantage in the online payments market (eBay owns PayPal).

If eBay get away with this in Australia, it seems highly likely they will extend the policy worldwide – we wait with baited breath…

More details here.