In a brief email message with no prior warning, PayPal have announced the closure of their Online Merchant Network site, which required specific registration, and have moved the content into a new open-to-all section of the main site, called the Business Resource Centre.

eBay posted their financial report for the last quarter of 2009, this week, and opened the statement by blaming Skype for causing a 3% drag on gross revenue growth.
The leader paragraph states that comparing Q4 2008 to 2009, revenues rose 16% inclusive of the Skype ownership period, but that factoring Skype out of the numbers [...]

A major earthquake struck the Caribbean island of Haiti on Tuesday 12 Jan, and measured 7.0 on the Richter scale.  This was significantly less than the 7.9 ‘quake that triggered the Boxing Day 2004 Asian Tsunami, yet TV pictures show significant on-shore damage and a country desperately needing help.
In a race to launch assistance gathering [...]

In a notification by email, wishing all merchants a Happy New Year, UK-based P2P online money transfer service MoneyBookers have announced they will soon be collecting fees from both the sender and the receiver.
In the short two paragraph footer to the Merchant Notification email, which revealed that over 60,000 merchants have integrated the MoneyBookers eWallet [...]

Over on PaymentsViews.com, Glenbrook’s Carol Coye Benson took a look at the UK’s Faster Payments Service.
Carol spoke with David McFarlane, Company Manager of CHAPS Clearing Company about FP – and said she was surprised by much of what he said – FP is not what you thought!
Her article comes at a good time to ask [...]

Quietly added to the list of major currencies in which PayPal users can hold funds within their account, as well as withdraw to bank, is the Thai Baht and Philippines Peso.
These currencies have very recently appeared without any English language announcement that I can find.  I learned of the additions only because of a [...]

Newly released data shows that PayPal is up to five times more fraud-prone than regular credit cards, based on statements made by eBay to the Australian ACCC last year.
Financial Fraud Action UK, the voice of the industry in the UK for financial fraud matters, (previously known as APACS) has published the latest payment industry fraud [...]

I have two PayPal accounts – one in the US and one in the UK.  Previously, I have been able to transfer funds between them via personal payments with no sending or receiving fee.  Since 1st July I have not been able to do so.
All month I have been battling my way past a chain [...]

PayPal recently released a new survey that found nearly half (45 percent) of online shoppers had abandoned their carts multiple times in the previous three weeks due to high shipping costs, security concerns and lack of convenience.
According to PayPal’s survey, the average cost of abandoned goods in U.S. shopping carts is $109.
The results of this survey [...]

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 [...]

When I first saw this headline on the news-feed, my immediate reaction was, “Woohoo, they’re cutting some slack for eBay sellers!“  After all, with the raft of changes since January 2008, most profitable eBay sellers have become not-for-profit organisations, haven’t they?
Sadly, my assumptions were both short lived, and wrong …

Whilst the overall global economy has been at the forefront of financial news so far this year, I’ve noticed that the news-feeds are rapidly filling up with an ever-increasing number of stories focussed on the US Credit Card Industry.
I’m not talking about panic depression about financial performance indicators and quarterly results worse than even eBay’s, [...]

The eBay Partner Network (ePN) has announced they will be culling large volumes of affiliate marketing opportunities that operate in what they call secondary tier programs.
The move comes as eBay Inc begin expanding onsite advertising (secondary fee charging) for sellers via the adCommerce program, and PayPal pre-announce swathes of changes in the Buyer Protection Program’s [...]

Etsy have advised important changes to the way they handle billing for seller fees.
A review of how billing works currently on Etsy is that the billing cycle starts on the first day of each month, and Etsy automatically sends a billing statement by email for the fees accrued in the previous month. Sellers have a [...]

Amazon Payments has published a new best practices guide for Checkout by Amazon.
As we’ve blogged before on BuildaSkill, the amazon checkout product appears to be chasing a slightly different customer set compared to both non-eBay PayPal marketing efforts, and to GoogleCheckout’s target market.  The subtle differences in the product and implementation to both the Amazon [...]