eBay CEO Meg Whitman said in a conference call last week that the company was scrapping seller commission fees in China but would require sellers there to use Safe Payments. eBay instituted a Safe Payments policy in the U.S. in January (announced in October), and it has rolled the Safe Payments policy out to other country sites as well (http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y05/m12/i22/s02). The new policy specifies exactly which payments sellers may accept in eBay listing descriptions and specifically prohibits sellers from stating in auction descriptions that they accept cash and instant cash-transfer services such as Western Union.

Acceptable Safe Payment methods vary according to country, and eBay said the policy launch was "based on safety concerns and input from the Community" (http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y05/m10/i17/s01). On eBay's China site eBay Eachnet, the only acceptable methods are PayPal and eBay's local escrow service, Whitman said.

In October, Whitman's rival in China, Alibaba CEO Jack Ma, had called on eBay to join Alibaba's C2C site Taobao in making its services free for Chinese users. Ma committed to leaving Taobao a free site for buyers and sellers for 3 more years.

At the time, eBay Eachnet issued a statement saying that free is not a business model and that "it speaks volumes about the strength of eBay's business in China that Taobao today announced that it is unable to charge for its products for the next three years." eBay had to eat its words last week, with major media outlets picking up on eBay's reversal of its position about fees in China. (Note that it appears eBay Eachnet will continue to charge sellers for optional services.)

Whitman said eBay is beginning to integrate Skype into eBay and PayPal on some international sites in China, Taiwan, Belgium and the Netherlands. On January 9, eBay spokesperson Hani Durzy had said eBay had not made any announcements about integrating Skype on eBay.com, but that eBay has not veered from exploring how to integrate Skype to the ecommerce experience on eBay.com.