The reason has nothing to do with eBay's customers, buyer or seller.
When Carl Icahn forced eBay to divest the profitable Paypal service, eBay had a (five year?) agreement to continue using it.
The contract is up and rather than re-upping the contract, eBay decided to start their own system using the Netherlands payment processor instead.
For history buffs, eBay did have its "own" payment service at the turn of the millennium, Billpoint, which they dumped in favour of buying Paypal when they were flush with cash, and not paying dividends. (They bought Skype around the same time, and a bunch of marginally useful other companies. Ahhh, the Noughties!)
The problems I see have mostly to do with the usual American provincialism.
They just can't understand that their sellers are all over the world and didn't think to consider than many of them (us) would have US dollar American bank accounts. Or would like to direct our payments into different banks as we needed money. Or would like to save up money in our accounts to buy The Thing.
Immediate payment of eBay fees (which now include MP fees of course) is simpler in some ways, but it doesn't let the seller know how much she is paying in fees to eBay and thus makes it more difficult to tell if a given month was profitable or not.
Probably beneficial for eBay since many sellers don't know the difference between a markup and a profit, and even more will freak out over a single refund after years of successful transactions.
I've closed all my dotCOM listings for the time being, at least until I can add my American bank account to my MP account.
