eBay is now allowing payments for auctions via PayPal on mobile phones (and holding a contest to promote the service). My personal view is that using any eBay-related service on a mobile is a potential recipe for disaster, since the one time I did my account suffered a still-unexplained security breach. If you've had a better time taking eBay mobile, tell us about it in the comments.

eBay's doing some cleaning up around the site (and for once it doesn't seem to involve putting PayPal anywhere the designers can think of). One consequence is that the Bid Assistant, a feature which helps you place bids on multiple similar items until you win an auction, is getting dumped, apparently because of lack of use. The eBay announcements board has the details on how the feature is getting ditched and what impact there'll be if you are currently using it.

Sites that let you book cheap local hotel rooms online are hardly a new commodity -- in the local market, there's Wotif, Hotelclub, Quickbeds and Check-In (and they're just the ones I can think off without prompting). Apparently that hasn't dissuaded eBay and Webjet from entering the fray with a new and similar offering, lotsofhotels.com.au. On an initial test, there's not much to differentiate the site (other than a scandalously slow search feature), and it doesn't take advantage of two obvious options for this partnership -- signing in via your eBay details or making payments via PayPal. As well, the inventory seems much smaller than most of the aforementioned competitors, but for budget-minded travellers, it never hurts to have another comparison option in your bookmarks. [lotsofhotels.com.au]

If there's an ageing notebook sitting in your garage waiting to get shifted, this week might be as good a time as any. eBay Australia is offering a 25% discount off the listing fee and (more significantly) a 25% discount on the final value fee for items listed in the computers category between July 26 and 29. Gives you some time to photograph it and write a listing before the weekend kick-off. [eBay Australia]

It looks like eBay still needs to encourage sellers in the wake of its embarrassing PayPal backdown. Less than two weeks after its last discount listing offer, the auction site is now offering a 10-day period of free insertion fees for auctions starting at $0.99 or below, running from July 12 to 21. That's only a saving of $0.30, but if you're keen to sell some stuff with low reserves, it's as good a time to do it as any.

A recent discussion at Whirlpool looks at an issue for auction sellers that's become more significant with eBay's prominent (albeit unsuccessful) attempts to push PayPal: what should you do if someone has paid you for postage but you work out that it's easier to deliver the item in person?
While the ethical answer is obvious (ask the buyer if they mind a personal delivery), the problem becomes more complicated if the buyer has already paid for the postage via PayPal (eBay's preferred approach) and then decides to ask for a refund, leaving you stuck with the fees. And is it worth risking personal delivery anyway, since in a dispute PayPal will invariably side with the buyer, not the seller, and you won't have much formal evidence of delivery? The best strategy would seem to be not having a fixed postage fee and waiting to get a delivery address before receiving any payment, but that makes the process of selling more time consuming. Tell us how you'd approach such a problem in the comments.

Having last week withdrawn any fixed date for making PayPal the sole acceptable payment method for Australian auctions, eBay has finally shown the white flag and officially killed off those plans. While users will still be required to offer PayPal to users who want it, other options such as cheques, money orders, bank deposits and rival services like PayMate will still be allowed. Good news for sellers and buyers everywhere, though it may take some time for the apparent decline in eBay usage by sellers and buyers annoyed by the proposed policy to reverse itself.

It may have taken a while to gets its internal systems in order, but eBay now seems to have accepted that it's not going to be easy to make PayPal the sole payment method available to Australian sellers. Having previously deferred the plan until July 15, eBay has now officially held off on banning other payment methods until further notice. While it remains a requirement to include PayPal as an option, other methods -- such as bank deposits, money orders, cheques, or rival payment systems -- are now back on the table. Why eBay didn't simply stick to this plan in the first place rather than shredding its brand remains a mystery we may never solve.

eBay Australia is holding one of its periodic discounted sales, not charging insertion fees for listings under $9.99 between June 26 and June 29. (Regular insertion fees for that kind of price range between 30 cents and 50 cents.)
Now, whether this is a standard end of financial year sale or an attempt to boost traffic in the face of everyone getting annoyed by its klutzy handling of the compulsory PayPal debacle is open to speculation. But we will point out that any auction listed during this period will be allowed to accept a range of payment methods, so it could be a good chance to offload that heap of semi-usable stuff you've been meaning to get rid of and save a little into the bargain.

Although eBay Australia was asked by the ACCC not to implement its plans for compulsory PayPal on June 17, delaying the scheme until at least July 15 and quite possibly indefinitely, it seems that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing at the auction giant. Alex Kidman at APC reports that many attempts to list items for auction are still producing messages saying only PayPal can be used as a payment method. An eBay spokesperson essentially blamed human error for the problem. Bottom line? The listings still work, apparently, but this doesn't make eBay look very organised. It might make sense to have that eBay virtual garage sale while you've definitely still got a choice, but don't be fooled by the on-screen messages.
eBay forces users onto PayPal-only auctions early ... by mistake [APC]