eBay adds Guest Buying for Fixed Price and Store Inventory Listings

[mandy]

***Introducing: Guest Buying*** 

Hello...I'm Evan Liang with eBay's Buyer Experience team. With the busy holiday season rapidly approaching, I'm excited to announce that we're launching Guest Buying, a new feature that we believe will help increase the number of new buyers who purchase sellers' Fixed Price and Store Inventory listings.

Why Guest Buying?
We've done a lot of research about buying habits as the Internet has evolved, and have been told repeatedly that requiring new buyers to register before they have a chance to really interact with eBay is a barrier to them taking the plunge (this is the same reason we introduced My eBay for Guests awhile back).

Today many online buyers expect to be able to visit a site and simply purchase and pay for an item with minimum hassle. Introducing Guest Buying will help encourage more first purchases by new buyers.

Here's how it works:

    * Guest buyers will be able to use Buy It Now to purchase eligible Fixed Price and Store Inventory items.
    * Guest buyers need to complete their payment through PayPal before the item is theirs, similar to Immediate Payment.
    * Your current PayPal settings will apply – if you require buyers to pay with a confirmed address, your Guest Buyers will need to do so as well.

Which listings are eligible for Guest Buying?
Your listings will be eligible to be purchased by Guest Buyers if you meet the following criteria:

  1. You must have a premier/business PayPal account in order to accept credit card payments.
  2. Shipping costs must be specified on your listing.
  3. You must qualify for the top tier of buyer protection of $2,000.
  4. The item price must be less than $2,000.
  5. You must use eBay's checkout system. Third-party checkout will not be supported at this time.

Can Guest Buyers leave feedback?
No – at least not until they register. eBay will encourage Guest Buyers to register once they make a purchase. Once they do, they'll be able to use all the same features and programs our current buyers do, such as Feedback, Buyer Protection, access to Customer Support, etc.

The Launch Plan
We're going to introduce Guest Buying slowly over the next few weeks. We're going to start by making it available in our Music, Books, DVDs & Movies, and Consumer Electronics categories in the next few days, and will add more categories shortly thereafter. Within a few weeks, Guest Buying should be available sitewide.

Sincerely,

Evan Liang
Buyer Experience

[amy]

Guest buyers need to complete their payment through PayPal

Guest buying sounds good until you get to the PayPal required part.  We had $29K ($17K declined by card issuer but $12K approved) in attempted credit card fraud in our largest store in October--most of it from Ghana IPs and Proxy IPs.

Using our fraud prevention tools we were able to catch the $12K that was approved by the card issuers before we shipped--our total fraud losses for the month were $0. 

If we had been relying on PayPal's suckass fraud prevention we wouldn't have known that $12K was fraudulent until after we shipped and we would have been looking at a $12K fraud loss for the month.

[mandy]

there was fear from sellers that certain bidders they had blocked from bidding on their items would use the Guest program to get around the block. eBay spokesperson Kim Rubey explained, "Existing users will be blocked from the guest flow - they will be asked to sign in so this is not a way around buyer blocks. We match via email address."

full article: http://blog.auctionbytes.com/cgi-bin/blo...80208.html