Payingfast's "on again, off again" attempt to sell the business is "off again." The owner of the online payment service put up the domain name up for auction on eBay last week for $5,000, but eBay removed the auction. PayingFast.com then put up the entire Payingfast service and site up for auction with a starting bid of $20,000, but hours later the seller removed the auction himself.

eBay spokesperson Hani Durzy said eBay ended the first auction because it violated the auction site's fee circumvention policy. "We believe that the seller may have been attempting to get people to contact him directly to purchase the Web site, so we ended the listing." The original listing was for the domain name Payingfast.com, and stated, "Payingfast.com domain for sale. We will also sell the whole website for the right offer." Within hours of eBay's action, Payingfast listed a new auction for the payment service instead of the domain name only. But on Friday, Payingfast terminated the auction.

"We have decided to continue operating Payingfast and will be taking new orders after we take care of some credit card merchant issues," said Payingfast president and founder Scott Rand.

Rand launched Payingfast in January 2001. The service allows consumers to purchase money orders using a credit card and focuses on eBay payments. It claims to be second largest seller of money orders for auctions on eBay, processing about 250 money orders a day with 200,000 registered users.

When asked why he changed his mind about selling the service, Rand said, "We think we still can run the company and have time for are other ventures. We still have a merchant account issue to deal with." He did not know when the service would be back up and running.

See related story at: http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y04/m03/i05/s00