eBay managed payments

[SetBuilder]

I have some personal experience with this. When I was in college around 2007 I had a side business of wholesaling bulk items to businesses like dollar stores. One time I sold a bulk lot of mp3 players that either got damaged in transit or arrived broken. The buyer complained to PP and back then they were pretty ruthless. They froze like $4,000 in my account and even after I sent them paperwork that I had refunded most of the funds to the buyer, they just sat on it for weeks and took almost the entire 180 days to lift the hold.

I was pissed at how unaccountable they were, so I decided to open an authorize.net merchant account. This was 2007-08, so you had to disable PP and enter your merchant account number and PIN into this hidden eBay page that I had to speak to like 3 people at eBay before someone there knew it even existed (apparently it wasn't that popular). Once the "migration" was complete, the PayPal button disappeared from my listings and the logos of all the major CC's like Visa and MC appeared in it's place. So far so good.

At the time I was selling a lot of iPhone cases and I remember that a good percentage of people were utterly confused that they couldn't check out with PP and would send me confused messages. The authorize.net account took them to a form where they had to enter their payment info. Even though it had an eBay logo at the top, it freaked people out, and I had a few cancelled orders as a result. Despite this, it worked fairly well. Most people didn't mind.

This was a decade ago. Today I would imagine that people are much more open about alternative payment methods and a switch like this would probably go a lot smoother.