Sorry to be posting this here if it's the wrong section for this stuff. If mods feels like shutting this down or moving it, then please do so.
Basically, today ebay had announced their yearly changes. The big one for us is that video games and computers must offer safer payment option (paypal or a merchant credit card). Ok to that, but they go on to say:
If you are required to offer a safer payment option, you might also be subject to holds on payment. PayPal may hold payments for the sale of an eBay item until the earliest of the following occurs:
- the buyer leaves positive feedback,
- 3 days after confirmed item delivery* or
- 21 days without a dispute, claim, chargeback, or reversal filed on that transaction.
I take this as "they will be doing this" rather than "might"....
So, I'm pretty shocked...if they follow this rule everytime, then it'll effect sales and prices greatly as it'll discourage people from selling. On average the dealer will wait about a week to get paid after shipping out the item assuming they use confirmed delivery on everything. Waiting for the customer to leave feedback is so unreliable and I don't think anyone will wait the 21 days, so everything will be confirmed delivery.
I'm guessing that perhaps they won't strictly follow this rule, but then again, who knows...this rule also applies to all sellers selling anything with their feedback under 100 and that would surely discourage any new sellers from listing anything...
http://pages.ebay.com/sell/update08/...q/index.html#1
This combined with the fact that dealers cannot leave any bad feedback for buyers is going to make it a very nasty place to sell at. So I'm clueless to how this will effect game sales, but it seems pretty big to me.