Robbert de Haan, Marketing Director of PayPal Benelux has posted in the official PayPal blog, providing proof positive that eBay Corporate’s much derided culture of surviving targets reset quarter-to-quarter, has been revised to a much shorter monthly redirection phasing.

Registered members of the BuildaSkill forums can read and discuss his post in our eBay Buyers Rules and Incentives forum, whilst those who prefer to remain with the flock can sheepishly head over to the original post on the PayPal blog, where comments are certain to be subject to censorship.

In essence, eBay’s Dutch classifieds site, Marketplaats.nl, rolled PayPal buyer protection to a limited set of categories (books, CDs/DVDs, & telecomms) on May 12th.  Robbert states, “The success of PayPal in these three groups has resulted in the rapid expansion of the program”, and that it has been expanded to a further 900 categories.

Superficially this is great news, until you pause for careful consideration of what has happened, and where it will lead given recent eBay policy direction.

First, all experienced sellers know that it is rarely eBay or PayPal that is out of pocket in the event of a buyer claim (for whatever reason), and that the bill is always paid by the seller – often with account restrictions, held funds (for unreasonable durations), and even the threat of banning from the sites.

Secondly, eBay throughout Europe has a history of imposing rules that are in breach of national or EC regulations regarding terms of trade that sellers are allowed or required to stipulate – the UK debacle of a home-business’s address on every listing being one such example.  After sellers created a right Royal stink, last spring, and threatened en-masse to drag the UK Trading Standards Authority into eBay HQ, the policy was reversed under the most transparent disingenuity as the reason, after under 4 days from original announcement – it was not the only such U-turn within EC eBay-countries last year.

In the Marketplaats case, PayPal are imposing the same consumer protection rights that apply to new goods, to listings for used and second-hand goods – this is completely incorrect under EC law.  Such guarantees are at the discretion of the individual seller and may be varied per item offered for sale.

Reading between the lines then, Mssr de Haan’s announcement could be reworded and read as -

Three weeks ago we implemented limited offerings for buyer protection.  Following extensive messaging to buyers from eBay and Marketplaats, buyers have now realised they can get goods for free, or on “try before you buy” terms, by gaming the PayPal Buyer Protection Policy.  Buyers have shown their enthusiasm for this, and have done so, so rapidly, and in such huge numbers, that we have been able to drive large volumes of small sellers away from the site, leaving more space for our beloved Diamond Mega-sellers.

Therefore, just 21 days after the program’s introduction, and without time for due diligence in analysing the program’s effect on the marketplace dynamics, we are extending it’s reach, from three primary categories, to over nine hundred more – a 30,000% expansion without any time for worthwhile analysis of intrinsic data.  This is in keeping with change targets and time-frames required by disruptive innovation policies set by our CEO John Donahoe.

We are now able to bankrupt small sellers faster than ever before, in addition to holding more money, from more of them, for longer, than was previously possible.  In this way, we can make mountains of profit on the short term money markets to bolster the collapsing market share and profit of our mother company’s core marketplaces division. We know our investors and stock-holders will approve of this move, therefore it is unimportant to us what our paying customers think about it.

We also anticipate our exiled ex-customers will migrate to other classifieds advertising sites, but we have a reserve plan to prevent that.  As announced in 2008, we have a massive tax-dodging war-chest sat in Switzerland, and we aim to buy up all the competition, leaving no place to go for those we have already milked dry.  We began this process last year, and will continue it in the future.

You, our paying customers, will learn that it is the eBay-PayPal way or the highway.  Resistance is futile – you will be assimilated.

OK, I couldn’t resist that last paragraph, but it really is beginning to feel like the eBorg have taken over the company whose founding principle was that “All people are basically good”, and which provided “a global marketplace”, with a “level playing field”, where “all sellers, large or small, can compete on equal footing”.

Finally, my thought here is that American nannyism and litigant-elevationism is guiding eBay policy in markets which have no historical cultures of such conditions.  This expansionism of American values is colonialism by e-proxy.

As a citizen of the only nation that once had “an Empire on which the sun never set”, and as a published historian, I heartily recommend resistance to such cultural subversion.  As humans, we are supposed to learn from our mistakes, and the principle of caveat emptor made our parents far more canny than our children are proving to be.

Protest the PayPal profit-killing policies, and protect your business.  Educate your buyers, and give them the power of decision based on full information before purchase.  Fully informed buyers are far less trouble than ill-informed ones … until eBay & Co message them to make trouble by ignoring the seller’s terms of sale in favour of eBay’s rules.

Don’t give your customers cause to go running like playground cry-babies to be Cling-ons at the eBorg’s apron strings.  Describe items fully, correspond promptly and professionally, and do what we all tell buyer’s to do – ask questions if you’re unsure of the buyer’s intent – a seller-cancelled sale is far less trouble and work than a buyer initiated charge-back.

Gaz