Customer Service

[Anonymous]

It seems that it is becoming a trend that any companies like eBay even Amazon has lousy customer service nowadays.  Sad!

I have been thinking of selling VHS or light books on Amazon only to find out that Amazon don't use PayPal!  Is Amazon so outdated that they cannot have another payment method like PayPal???

That is their loss as I am sure that there are lots of buyers don't have credit cards, only PayPal and they cannot shop at Amazon!  What a loss!!

[recped]

Do you really expect Amazon to support a payment system owned by their single largest competitor?

In the USA, bank account debit cards are all branded by Visa so they work like a credit card online. So the only people who can't shop there are those that have neither a credit card of any kind of a bank account. People in that situation probably are not doing too much shopping on Amazon or anywhere else, if they really did want to an Amazon gift card or Prepaid Visa/MC works as well.

[mr.elmwood]

Amazon had $61 BILLION in revenue for 2012. As a country, Amazon would be #62 out of 192.

[recped]

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@mr.elmwood wrote:
Amazon had $61 BILLION in revenue for 2012. As a country, Amazon would be #62 out of 192.

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In spite of having B$61 flow through their hands they still managed to lose $19 Million in 2012.

On the other hand I doubt that accepting PayPal would have helped one bit.

[Anonymous]

Where was Amazon not using PayPal way before eBay owns PayPal that time???

[Anonymous]

I should say if Visa or Mastercard is owned by eBay, would Amazon not offer Visa as a payment method? 

[reallynicestamps]

I believe that before Paypal (and before Billpoint) purchases on Amazon required the buyer to enter her credit card number.

Because Amazon sold most of their items directly at that time, with few private sellers using them as a venue, this worked fine.

[pierrelebel]

Back in 1998 and 1999, I listed my items at auction on Amazon.  The system was slightly different from eBay and the results not as good.

At that time, all payments from buyers came by mail (cheques or money orders).

[pjcdn2005]

The first couple of times I purchased something on Amazon.com, I paid using Google checkout. I believe its called Google Wallet now but I don't know if Amazon still uses it.

[pjcdn2005]

Back in 1998 and 1999, I listed my items at auction on Amazon.  The system was slightly different from eBay and the results not as good.

At that time, all payments from buyers came by mail (cheques or money orders).

That really wasn't that long ago. It's amazing how things have changed. When I started selling here there were still some people who preferred to pay by cheque or money order but it has been a few years since I was asked to accept either one of those.

[73rhc]

I started here in 1997 and it was mostly cash, cheque or money order. It was mainly up to the seller what form of payment he/she would accept. When Paypal came along it was a little annoying as all was in US dollars. Unless you had an account with a US based bank, you were hit with the exchange rate. Btw, there was no eBay.ca! So all listings were in US funds. All that being said, I never had a problem with these payment methods. And I dislike that they are no longer allowed in most categories. An eBay exec told me over the phone that it was for everyone's protection, fraud and so forth. I still strongly believe it's simple matter of collecting the fees on all of those transactions that they were missing out on, previously.

[recped]

While there is still plenty of fraud on eBay when eBay went to electronic payments only many specific fraud strategies stopped immediately. 

Fraudsters of course came up with new ideas but most of the fraud in the early days of eBay involved payment methods like money orders and Western Union transfers.

I loved getting cash in the mail every day but way to many buyers were getting ripped off.

Beyond the outright fraud, paper payment methods allowed some sellers to operate in totally unacceptable ways.

[73rhc]

Now it's the seller getting ripped off by some crafty bidders/buyers!