Have you ever been bullied by eBay and PayPal?

Fred Shu
Ecommerce Refocus
Published in
2 min readApr 29, 2019

Is eBay or Amazon your only income source? Then you really need to be worried: How about one day eBay or Amazon does not allow you to trade on its platform anymore? Impossible? Here is the hard lesson I have learned.

Have you ever been bullied by eBay and PayPal?

I have been successfully selling on eBay for 12 years until one day PayPal suddenly limited my accounts and I was forced to leave eBay, because, without an active Paypal account, you can not sell on eBay, simple.

“Violating the User Agreement” is the reason that PayPal limits my accounts. I was asked to provide an authorization letter from Dell for selling Dell products, even I explained to PayPal that those items are used or pre-owned, there is no way and no need to be authorized by Dell.

PayPal won’t listen to my explanation. The decision is final: you can not use PayPal anymore. Is this a joke? No warning is given and no appeal is allowed? Yet it is solely eBay or PayPal’s business decision not allowing someone to use their services, doesn’t matter the decision or the process is fair or not. However, how miserable people’s life could be when people solely rely on eBay and PayPal to make a living, and the couple deprives their rights recklessly.

eBay and PayPal are capable of bullying users because of their monopoly power. This is the reason why there are people who never stop seeking “eBay PayPal alternatives”.

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Fred Shu
Ecommerce Refocus

Founder of 1centx.com: free online marketplace, Community owned and governed.