Bid-alot Upgrades

[Mojavelyn]

Upgrades and more coming....
 
Bid-alot has decided to relax the PayPal only verification, you may now register and verify with a credit card.

Sellers have had a choice of accepting various payment methods.   Now sellers can also decide to accept PP verified bidders only or all.  

Stores are now premium and separate from Auctions, altho you can upload to Store, Auction or both, with personal store categories. There are two level of stores.  If you had a shop previously, you will have to activate the store, there is a fee involved, and upload your items.

New look to stores and auctions.

new Icon: superseller and PP vierified.

Auction listings still free unless you want enhancement, and these fee's have not changed.

Free counters in various styles to compliment listings.

Security and Fraud Free is still top priority.

Shipping calculators were added a while back.

I've been told there are more upgrades coming.

[bargainbloodhound]

Bid-alot has decided to relax the PayPal only verification, you may now register and verify with a credit card.

I like the addition of credit card verification because I feel more confident when a buyer/seller has been verified with a credit card than I do when a buyer has been verified by PayPal (which seems to use its parent company eBay's very lax registration standards...yeah, I've had many problems in the past with 'PayPal verified' buyers on eBay  using "fraudulent funds", attempting to do chargebacks months later, etc).

I've been told there are more upgrades coming.

One upgrade I would love to see an auction site do is add a merchant account gateway enabled checkout  so buyers can pay by credit card. ;D  A lot of auction management services offer this in their checkouts, but so far no auction sites do (eBay for obvious reasons never will)  :'(  A checkout with Moneybookers would be nice too  ;D

[Mojavelyn]

PayPal has a 30 day thing on buyer protection. So I'm not really sure that would matter if its months later. I know that instant checkout was added, even an additional item upcost calculator was added, and has been active for sometime.

I believe something like a merchant account has been added, but don't hold my feet to the fire on that. I know that Jim is adding the facility for sellers to decide whether or not to accept bids from non-paypal users.

Why don't you post that suggestion on the B-A board?

[Bid-Alot]

Hi - the problem with a payment process like this is users would have to pay us for the items ...  we would then have to pay the seller  - - This would mean a double whammy of charges...  An idea we have played with is to create our own auction payment system...  This would be a whole new project in itself and will have to stay on hold until we would be in a position to take this on.

We will be adding ikobo and 2checkout as payment gateways for members to pay accounts this week....  We do have moneybookers (who unfortunatly do not supply a way to transfer data back to our script yet) and we also have nochex (which is £ only)  so we think we will be sticking with Paypal, ikobo and 2checkout . .

[bargainbloodhound]

We will be adding ikobo

iKobo seems to be going through some changes.  They completely eliminated their merchant accounts/gateway recently (we used it in one of our stores).  They also are not accepting MasterCard at the moment (see notice below):

Important Notice: We apologize that we are temporarily unable to accept MasterCard as a payment method. We expect to resolve this issue in the near future. Thank you for your patience.

Edited to add: iKobo isn't alone in having problems with MasterCard.  BidPay also is no longer able to accept MasterCard.

[Bid-Alot]

Thanks for letting us know this - - as we speak im waiting for someone to answer their Livehelp..  I think we will maybe scrub these as a gateway.... 

[Bid-Alot]

Just spoke to Livehelp..  Ikobo no longer offer merchant accounts...  only person to person payments...    so thats them outta window! 

[nowhereman]

Please forgive me if Im in the wrong place to post, How does one Introduce them self?
nowhereman

[Mojavelyn]

Bet the Mastercard thing has something to do with the hacker/theft that happened a short time back.