bidpay.com closing down 12/31/05

R

Rich Silfver

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From bidpay.com's home page:

"Effective December 31, 2005, BidPay.com, Inc. will be discontinuing operations. As a result, BidPay will no longer offer payment services to the online auction industry. We regret any inconvenience to our users and thank them for their loyal patronage. Customer service will remain available at bidpayservice@bidpay.com through the month of February. "

So if you're bidding on something that you plan on paying with bidpay you may want to consider other payment options..
 
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Wow!

I guess they can't compete with Paypal.

A lot of sellers take Bidpay and not Paypal. More Cashier's Checks and Money Orders.
 
That sucks ! :mad:

Bidpay.com is a GREAT way to send money orders to US/CA without spending a fortune. Many countries (Spain included) have no such thing as a normal postal money order for specific countries (US/CA among them), so the only alternative is the (expensive) WU money transfer.

Bidpay.com allowed to send money to non-registered sellers, they just took the payment and forwarded a Western Union money order to the seller FROM INSIDE the destination country.

:(

Anyway thanks for the info Rich.
 
Brian Sweeney said:
Wow!

I guess they can't compete with Paypal.

A lot of sellers take Bidpay and not Paypal. More Cashier's Checks and Money Orders.
Click to expand...

A couple of years ago BidPay (owned by Western Union) won a lawsuit to force eBay to post it's payment services on all listings - even if the seller did not request it.

Unlike PayPal, with BidPay the buyer pays the fees - not the seller.

Since most buyers on eBay know that sellers already "boost" charges for S&H etc. to cover their PayPal expense - they have refused en masse to use BidPay.

When I used to do a lot of selling on eBay I several times tried "requiring" BidPay and "refusing" PayPal. Wound up with a lot of USPS Money Orders. But then the counterfeit MOs became a problem and I switched back to only taking PayPal.

So now, when I occassionally sell, I just accept the PayPal expense.

On the other side, except rarely when I really want something, I only bid on items where the seller takes PayPal because I am protected and don't have to pay a transaction fee. Guess a lot of other buyers feel the same way.
 
That's too bad. More competition for Paypal is better for consumers in general. It is nice that Paypal is so easy to use and prevalent now, but I hope it doesn't go to their heads (Paypal & Ebay) and make it an essential monopoly.
 
I never used BidPay, never even signed up for it. I never got a good feeling from the description of their service. Sounded all too fraud sensitive to me.

Who uses money order anyway? Hardly anyone in Europe for sure.

And I would NEVER want money send the WU or MG way unless I'm 100% sure that I get what I paid for.

PayPal is for me the prefered method of payment, though I would like to see payment through IBAN number (within the EU), Rabobank Direct Payment (straight from my bank account), iDEal (i-payment method set up by the collective dutch banks) or similar methods.
 
Flyfisher Tom said:
That's too bad. More competition for Paypal is better for consumers in general. It is nice that Paypal is so easy to use and prevalent now, but I hope it doesn't go to their heads (Paypal & Ebay) and make it an essential monopoly.
Click to expand...

Yes, it would be nice if PayPal had some competition. I've heard that both Google and Yahoo have been experimenting with payment transfer services.

The key comptetive requirement is that the seller, not the buyer, pay the transaction fee. The other way around doesn't "work", hence BidPay's demise.

In fact, payment transfer is not necessarily a profitable business, PayPal was actually losing money before it "fell into the arms" of eBay.

Essentially, what happened is that eBay became dependent on PayPal's transaction services. PayPal was losing money and was at risk of closing down - this would have left eBay with no convenient payment mechanism. So essentially, eBay was forced to "prop up" PayPal by taking it over.

That move "depressed" eBay's stock price for several quarters.

I do not know if PayPal even makes any money for eBay now. But having a "deep pocket" parent has enabled them to branch out to non-auction payments services, credit cards etc.
 
Interesting.
I've only used BidPay a couple times. Once as a buyer and once as a seller. It was a horror show as a seller. This was earlier this year when I was selling my assistants bronica 6x6 SQ-B camera to a gentleman in the Czech Republic.

He was excellent to deal with.
BidPay was not.

He had sent the payment via BidPay and I waited, and waited, and waited - over a month of back and forth emails with the buyer - and I still waited - and then he eventually cancelled the BidPay payment and went with PayPal instead - the day after I shipped out his camera (about 6 weeks after the initial "I made the transaction payment via BidPay" email) I got the Western Union money order in the mail - and no, it wasn't the post office that had the issue because the date on the stamp was a few days prior, it was BidPay.

This will be "bad" in a way for many sellers/buyers but it opens up potential for someone else to hopefully step in and offer an alternative to PayPal as well.

Dave

Edit: Whoops.. changed my "seller" to "buyer" in the 3rd paragraph
 
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dcsang said:
Interesting.
I've only used BidPay a couple times. Once as a buyer and once as a seller. It was a horror show as a seller. This was earlier this year when I was selling my assistants bronica 6x6 SQ-B camera to a gentleman in the Czech Republic.

He was excellent to deal with.
BidPay was not.

He had sent the payment via BidPay and I waited, and waited, and waited - over a month of back and forth emails with the seller - and I still waited - and then he eventually cancelled the BidPay payment and went with PayPal instead - the day after I shipped out his camera (about 6 weeks after the initial "I made the transaction payment via BidPay" email) I got the Western Union money order in the mail - and no, it wasn't the post office that had the issue because the date on the stamp was a few days prior, it was BidPay.

This will be "bad" in a way for many sellers/buyers but it opens up potential for someone else to hopefully step in and offer an alternative to PayPal as well.

Dave
Click to expand...


Yes, by using its Western Union MO system sent in the mail, BidPay was trying to make additional $$ by working the "float" b/w receipt of the buyer's funds and final remittance to the seller!

Say what you will about PayPal but at least payment is instantaneous. The seller gets the payment (less PayPal fee) immediately and then can ship at once. I've gotten items in NY sent from CA within 2 or 3 days of winning a bid.

With BidPay it would have been more like 2 or 3 weeks, or even worse as was Dave's experience.
 
Too bad!

Bidpay made it easy for a USA buyer to pay in UK Pounds.
I never had a problem with any Bidpay purchase.

Not so Paypal! I got screwed by them early on and haven't used them since.

Oh well, I guess that'll be me you see standing in line at the post office...

Keep Chris in Christmas
-Chris-
 
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