MoneyBookers have announced the appointment of a new CFO.

As one of Europe’s largest and fastest growing online payment systems companies, they have announced the appointment of Paul Goodridge as Chief Financial Officer.

Prior to joining Moneybookers, Goodridge was Director of Finance at CSR Plc where he was responsible for all financial, legal, IS and investor relations aspects of the business. While at CSR Plc, he oversaw both its floatation on the London Stock Exchange at a valuation of £200m and its subsequent promotion into the FTSE 250, making it one of the most successful technology IPOs in the last five years. Under Paul’s stewardship, CSR grew from a loss making 70 person company with $5m revenue to a 1,200 person business with $850m revenue and a 20% EBIT margin.

MoneyBookers provides domestic payment options in more than 40 countries and processes over €10m in transactions each day for customers in 200 countries, and provides customer service in 12 languages. With almost 5 million account holders Moneybookers is one of the largest e-wallets worldwide.

Moneybookers enables any business or consumer to securely and cost-effectively send and receive payments online, simply by using an email address. Everyday, Moneybookers welcomes more than 9,000 costumers as new owners of its electronic wallet - which provides convenience and enhanced security for online shopping, real-time payments and transactions. More than 9,000 merchants use Moneybookers’ gateway product, among them global ecommerce brands such as Skype, and Foto.com

Having been on the road for a week, and finally getting to my mailbox today, I was perturbed to spot several PayPal-style phishing emails claiming I had received large Euro deposits to my MoneyBookers account.

The emails are very authentic-looking, and almost had me fooled.  Checking the mail headers immediately revealed them as fake however.  They all came from a PacBell.com email address (a USA ISP) instead of from MoneyBookers.com

Watch out for them if you have a MoneyBookers account - as I said, they look identical to the mails received from the genuine source.  Remember the number one rule regarding ANY email from a financial service provider -

• NEVER click the link in the email
• ALWAYS open a new browser window and type the address of the payment provider and log in directly

Worryingly, forwarding the phishing mails to spoof@moneybookers.com resulted in a bounced email with an http 5.x.x error advising they don’t accept direct emails and all communication must be through the contact page inside the site.  This represents a cavalier attitude to fraud prevention and prosecution in my estimation.

Because I’m on the road, I don’t have time to follow this up right now, but I will do so when I get back.

Ed

eBay UK announced yesterday that they will be “launching a new streamlined Checkout flow, which is designed to simplify and improve the buying process.”

That’s great news - anything that improves the buyer experience and results in less mistakes (by the buyer) during checkout in regard to selecting the correct shipping, insurance and so on, will be a definite step forward, as will facilitating sellers getting paid faster.

However ……

There are a few immediate concerns that spring to mind with this change to one of the most vital site functions.  Any UK seller, who lists and sells outside of the UK market, will tell you that there are ongoing problems with the shipping calculator on the North American sites.  On and off-eBay, I’ve heard of situations where UK registered sellers, uploading listings onto eBay US, have then checked their listings and found that all shipping options and costs for all destinations except the US, have been removed during upload (this is a particular issue when uploading through Turbo Lister, but has also happened with the SYI form).  Most commonly affected by this appears to be Canadian buyers.

Another, issue with the shipping calculator (and not confined to the US) relates to combined and discounted shipping for multiple purchases.  This has been, and remains, broken since the change of discount system in January/February 2007, and first began appearing on the Canadian site during late-December 2006.  Sometimes it shows as applying no discounts, sometimes applying only the shipping for the first item (and none of the others), sometimes applying additional item discount to all items including the first, and sometimes just picking a shipping cost out of the ether that has no relationship to the value set by the seller.  And then, most irritatingly - actually working correctly sometimes.  The latter case usually being after firing a complaint to eBay Customer Service.

So, shipping calculation, shipping destination and cost display, and shipping settings retention, are not working correctly.  Soon, the final fees sellers pay to eBay will be partly based upon buyer’s assessment of shipping costs, and eBay are “fiddling” again with the buyer interactive part of the shipping costs at the checkout screen.  Confidence inspiring?   Not!

Now I said initially that such improvements are generally good news, and any seasoned eBay seller will tell you that good news site tweaks normally roll in the US first, then later, the rest of the world gets them.  Bad news tweaks roll to one of the other sites first, and arrive in the US last. 

So is the UK getting this first, to be interpreted as bad news for sellers?

Historical habits would suggest so, yet, the intended application should be only good for both buyer and seller …. until you look at what’s going on in the US. 

Tighter and tighter integration of PayPal into the eBay platform is being challenged in a class action lawsuit in the US.  The suit contends that eBay have abused their monopoly and forced unreasonable and additional costs onto sellers by excluding various payment methods and by increasingly driving users to adopt PayPal.  Not least of which is the ongoing campaign to have buyers fund payment by credit or debit card through PayPal.  This loads a card acceptance fee onto the seller within PayPal, and absolves PayPal of Seller Protection if the card company makes a chargeback.  They achieve this by not permitting card funded payments on the fee-free Personal account, and only allowing card payments through Business & Premier accounts, where all payment receipts are subjected to fees, that are not levied on personal accounts, which cannot accept card-funded payments.  Click through to the actual class action filing - it makes very interesting and illuminating reading.

Where this leaves sellers in the UK, is that eBay have banned a lot of payment processors and then never reviewed their ban list.  Google Checkout, despite the reputation and standing of the parent company, was banned based on being too new - the minimum operational period (for being approved) has now passed, but the list has not been reviewed.  eBay UK’s then MD, Doug McCallum, bailed out of an interview on the BBC at the last minute, because on the day he was due to be interviewed, someone added NoChex to the prohibited payments list - that was later reversed, but led to a large number of compaints and ammended listings over the weekend that the ban remained published in the eBay UK Help pages.

With these latest site tweaks, eBay are further brainwashing buyers and sellers alike into PayPal being visible as the only permitted payment method (keyword = visible), and increasing the operational costs of sellers, as this change will increase PayPal usage amongst buyers.   Ultimately, that will increase cost of goods advertised on eBay, and higher prices will lead to lower sales.   The UK government should also be paying attention as the volume traded annually on eBay is contributory to UK economic inflation figures in this context, it may be a small contribution overall, but it is an avoidable additional pressure on that key economic value.

eBay have already prohibited any form of surcharging for payments via PayPal, but allow sellers to surcharge for processing credit and debit cards through their own (non-PayPal) merchant services processing agreement.  This means simply, if you have a facility with your bank or others, to accept card payments, you can surcharge to recoup the fees.  If you accept cards through an online processor, such as PayPal, MoneyBooker, NoChex etc, you cannot - this directly interferes with the cost of receiving the payment and facilitating clearance of it in a manner not within the user agreements of all but PayPal.  eBay is therefore applying trade interference.  As such, now is the time to advertise discounts when paying by other methods (eBay has no policy on doing that) - if you can handle the workload of moving buyers off the eBay checkout system, and begin invoicing direct from within MoneyBookers, NoChex et al.

The US class action contends that eBay has a monopoly position and is abusing that position.  The same applies in the UK.  The eBay auction model has not enough competition to bring eBay’s total usage down to a total market percentage that would allow argument that eBay does not have a dominant monopoly of the channel. 

Arguments about Amazon’s size are irrelevant - Amazon’s market model is direct purchase in the style of online retail, not auction, and therefore Amazon’s enforced use of Amazon Payments does not compare to the eBay & PayPal situation - Amazon’s payment methods restriction is no different to high street shops stipulating which payment methods they will accept.  Additionally, Amazon sells products as well as advertising space, therefore they have only simplified the process for buyers and 3rd-party sellers alike, by moving the buyer’s payment method variations into the process layer between purchase and fulfillment instruction - this removes the problem of 3rd-party sellers having a myriad of payment processors, some of which may not be available to Amazon, and adds the function that Amazon may have access to some payment processors that their 3rd-party sellers maybe could not obtain authorisation for.  Amazon’s payments interface therefore is symbiotic for the four groups involved - Amazon, buyers, sellers, and payment processors. 

eBay’s payments process model is not the same - eBay does not sell any products, it only sells advertising space and therefore any payment method restrictions should only be applied to eBay’s paying customers when they are paying eBay, not to distanced transactions between third parties (buyers and sellers) whose payment terms and other contractual conditions do not involve eBay anymorw than they would involve a newspaper or shop window carrying an advert that brought them together.

What eBay are further doing with these scheduled checkout tweaks, involves gravitating all parties towards only being able to utilise eBay’s in-house and fully owned subsidiary to the exclusion / omission of all others, and for the financial benefit of eBay.  That is abuse of monopolistic position.  eBay are denying freedom to sellers to be able to select the payment methods they will accept, at costs that are acceptable to their business model, and the freedom of buyers to select payment methods they have access to, at costs which are agreeable.

Buyers and sellers need to wake up to this now, and begin bombarding eBay (and government agencies) with correspondence demanding the return of freedom of payment method choice within the dominant monopoly that advertises itself as “just a venue”.  The initial calls should include that checkout features ALL payment methods shown in the acceptable payment methods policy - after all, if they are acceptable, why are they not integrated with checkout already, unless eBay has a not-so-hidden agenda to monetise the checkout system by promoting PayPal? 

Ed

 Our Online-Business Discussion Forums

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MoneyBookers” title=”MoneyBookers” />Moneybookers, one of the world’s leading online payment providers, and Afterbuy, one of the leading software providers for auction sellers, have joined forces to offer eBay PowerSellers and online merchants the most comprehensive all-in-one payment solution ever available.

As a worldwide innovation Afterbuy customers can now receive payments via more than 40 international payment options instantly. There is no need for further integration with any payment or credit card processing company. To ensure perfect conversion, auction buyers will not need to go through the usual lengthy registration process.  For example, they can select their credit card and pay quickly and easily as if it were a conventional credit card integration. The new solution is available worldwide in 12 languages and with full customer support.  Moneybookers also offers its clients a ZERO Chargeback guarantee.

Afterbuy is an all-in-one software solution developed by ViA-Online targeting all eBay sellers and online merchants.  With Afterbuy, selling on the internet becomes pure pleasure.  The eBay-certified solution allows users to manage all their products in a database. Later on all data can be reused for professionally designed sales offers which can be placed on eBay and other shopping platforms at the push of a button.

Verified eBay PowerSellers who have registered as users of the BuildaSkill Forums, can find full details of the above facilities in our PowerSeller-only discussion board here.

Ed

 osCommerce is a popular Open Source ecommerce catalog and shopping cart system.  It has almost 200,000 registered users in its support forums, and a healthy community of developers providing extensions and modifications for it.  At least a quarter of a million online stores have implemented it, and the number grows everyday.

In the osCommerce support forums, a debate has opened regarding unexpected fees incurred by one user, after they installed a payments gateway extension for one of the less used online payment processors - MoneyBookers Website”>MoneyBookers.

It seems they’re not happy about a 2% processing charge, despite MoneyBookers being open and up-front about their fees.

MoneyBookers fees are at three levels depending on the type of account the receiver has enabled, and on the payment funding method chosen by the payer.  For the merchant to minimise fees, they need to steer clear of the Merchant Gateway solution and use an “old fashioned” email-receiver-details-to-buyer payment instruction methodology.

Although it increases admin load and is not as instant as using the gateway, I recommend the email payment-receiver details method, when using MoneyBookers. Their fees on Merchant Gateway credit card processing are 8% making them the most expensive in the industry (and even making PayPal look cheap) however, they do guarantee zero chargebacks.

An alternative is to pay the GBP 50.00 NoChex registration for a Merchant Account (they also guarantee no chargebacks) in order to accept Visa and Mastercard globally, but all transactions will be in UK Pounds Sterling, and you must have both a UK address, and a UK bank account, before you can open a NoChex account.

Failing that, you’re stuck with a regular Merchant Services account or a PayPal account.

It’s worth noting that MoneyBookers is very popular in Central Europe (especially Germany) due to the no-fee bank transfer that users can use to fund their MoneyBookers account. It’s also extremely popular in areas where PayPal are over-strict such as Asia-Pacific, South America, and Africa - in those zones, the MoneyBookers no-chargebacks policy comes into it’s own.

Maybe you prefer Western Union, or similar, from those zones, but with all the anti wire-transfer propaganda that eBay/PayPal have been pushing out, you’ll find resistance to using such services will grow over the coming years, and that could slow your sales of “no charge-back payment type” sales unless you have an alternative routing such as MoneyBookers.

At the end of it all - remember it’s only a couple of years since there wasn’t any IPN, Gateways etc - the vast majority of your buyers will be ignorant of the progress made in such technologies and only expect such automation from mega-companies such as banks or eBay.

For a couple of years at least, it won’t hurt customer-relationships to rely on more manual methodology if you’re trading outside of the developed western alliances - heck, even within such countries, there are still lots of technophobes scared of too much automation.  And with organisations such as the UK’s Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) reporting that online credit card fraud, and identity theft, are the UK’s fastest growing crime type, the unwilling-to-pay-online community will be around for a long time to come.

…. there’s more than one way to skin a rabbit

Ed

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