I finally broke down and decided to sign up with eBay as a seller (the usual story: wanted to sell some stuff I no longer need).
Fine, I have my little credit card, and a real e-mail address, so I go to the seller’s registration form:
Supply my bank account info? What?
As I said, I have a valid credit card (a secondary one I use precisely for these sort of things, so I can keep track of odd fees and readily cancel it if necessary), but I have only one Bank account and much rather not let eBay have access to it. Yes, I saw their $5.00 verifier affliate, but I rather not spend more than I need to (and they’ll probably ask for my bank info too)
So, what tatics did you recent eBay sellers take to not give bank account info, or to prevent eBay from cleaning out your checking account?
They need it so they can charge back. If someone
buys something from you & wants the money back, they can request a chargeback & take
the money from your acct. That’s for paypal, I don’t know if it works for Ebay’s Billpoint.
Are you talking about
Ebay or Paypal as I know Paypal has a $5 credit for new acct referals.
Nope, eBay seller registration.
Not paypal (although I would expect that from them too)
I’ve been selling on eBay for years and I don’t ever remember being asked for bank account information. Admittedly though, I do not use PayPal or BillPoint. For my transactions, it’s personal check, cashier’s check, or money order only, and that’s that. I’ve had a few problems with bidders who snipe at the last minute and then never pay up after scaring away the real customers but that’s a little off-topic.
I admit that it’s possible eBay did ask me for bank account info years ago and I forgot about it, but honestly, it is a publicly traded company with a pretty respectable operation. And while I understand being publicly traded means nothing in terms of honesty (i.e. Enron), I’d give them the benefit of the doubt. I doubt that any high profile company is ever ‘out to screw you’ because of the overall risk to their reputation, but that’s my opinion, and obviously if you don’t feel comfortable giving them this information, then don’t and try advertising in your local paper for the items you want to get rid of…
My guess is they want it to prevent banned users from coming back with a different email address and different credit card number. When ebay started, all you needed to sign up was an email address, phone number and mailing address (which weren’t confirmed). In the past couple of years they started requiring credit cards. Many times ebay scammers will list a large number of high-dollar items at the same time, then take the money and run, and sign up for a new ebay userid with a different credit card. Requiring banking information makes it that much harder (and probably makes scammers a little more leery if they know ebay has access to their accounts). Of course, it won’t prevent scams, since it’s fairly trivial to close one bank account and open another.
Well, here’s eBay’s reasoning for this:
Yarster - they changed the requirements on June 11, 2001, so they may not have asked you for your bank account info.
"they changed the requirements on June 11, 2001, so they may not have asked you for your bank account info. ’
that explains things, thanks.
Well now I guess you could ask the people who would know, they are in a newsgroup:
alt.marketing.online.ebay