eBay just became an even stronger player when it comes to online payments and classifieds. The company has announced two acquisitions today: the first one is U.S.-based online payments business Bill Me Later for approximately $820 million in cash and approximately $125 million in outstanding options.

The second acquisition is Denmark’s leading online classifieds site dba.dk, as well as vehicles site bilbasen.dk for approximately $390 million in cash.

Bill Me Later, as explained by eBay’s president and CEO John Donahoe, is complementary to PayPal. “Together, PayPal and Bill Me Later will make online payments safer, easier and more convenient than ever,” he says. DBA, on the other hand, is another corner of the world conquered as far as classifieds go. “We are the global leader in classifieds with top positions in Canada, Australia, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom, and sites in more than 1,000 cities across 20 countries. The acquisition of dba.dk and bilbasen.dk gives us technology and expertise we can leverage across our classifieds portfolio to create better customer experiences,” said Donahoe.

Despite obviously not being short with money, eBay will cut its workforce by approx. 10 percent, which translates to about 1,000 employees and several hundred temporary workers. As they say, this reduction will “simplify and streamline eBay’s organization, improve the company’s cost structure and strengthen the overall competitiveness of the company’s existing businesses.” I bet it’s great consolation to the folks that are about to be laid off.

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Amazon has announced this morning their acquisition of AbeBooks. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. AbeBooks is a marketplace for used, rare and out-of-print books. AbeBooks reports over 110 million books listed for sale and "tens-of-thousands" of sales every day.

Think of AbeBooks in the same way you think of purchasing from a third-party dealer/seller on Amazon’s books category. The deal is expected to close by the end of 2008.

Amazon and AbeBooks have worked together for years now. AbeBooks began online operations in 1996 and is based in Canada.

AbeBooks will continue to function as a stand-alone operation based in Victoria, British Columbia. AbeBooks will maintain all of its websites, including its Canadian website with Canada-specific content, such as reviews of Canadian-authored books and interviews of Canadian writers.

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Web celebrity Chris Pirillo announced earlier this week that on his birthday someone was able to hack into his iTunes account and purchase $450 in iTunes gift cards using his PayPal account. Chris spoke with Apple and apparently Apple has changed the way they verify birthdates to make sure this never happens again.

Chris then approached PayPal and filed a claim to get his $450 back. PayPal sent the results of their investigation yesterday which includes, "We have completed our investigation of your claim and have determined that this is not an instance of unauthorized account activity. At this time, your claim has been denied."

Chris replies, "What the HELL are they thinking? My password was obtained illegally. My money was taken without my consent… again illegally. How exactly can they determine that this was not an instance of unauthorized anything?!"

Unfortunately Chris does not note whether Apple has been able to provide a refund for the unauthorized charges. If the gift cards haven’t been used, can’t Apple just deactivate them and refund the money immediately? If they have been used, the shipping addresses for the purchased merchandise should be great info to provide to the local police.

This type of run-around is something we see often from PayPal. We’ve written several times about PayPal and their usual lack of communication.

In this case it does seem like Apple is the merchant and should work with Chris to make him whole. But it sure would be great to see PayPal work with it’s consumers (i.e. Chris) to get satisfaction for their users as they deal with the merchant.

Sometime around May 16 a bug appeared in PayPal’s subscription payments page that stops people from paying if they live in a different country than the site collecting the money. The original complaint and discussion about it are here.
We’ve been hearing about it for a few days now, but bugs generally aren’t big news […]

Last week I explained why startups should have status notifications for downtime, maintenance and any other customer communications. I assumed large companies already knew this but apparently not. The real question is: when should a company post a notice of an issue that they know about? My initial thought is immediately but clearly there are times when it makes sense not to post immediately — for example, a security hole.

A developer posted an issue with accepting payments on the PayPal message board on May 16, 2008. The issue centers around the ability to accept a payment when they country of the buyer and seller don’t match. When you select another country, a never-ending loop begins. It took PayPal 7 days to even acknowledge the issue.

PayPal has posted a message on their status page with a basic explanation. Apparently when they rolled out their last site update on May 15, 2008, the issue listed above arose. The issue still has not been resolved and no further status has been provided by PayPal.

Clicky CEO Sean Hammons has a good detailed explanation of the issue. Hammons notes that the issue, "has already cost us many many thousands of dollars in lost revenue." He goes on to say:

How many millions of dollars has this bug cost all of Paypal’s customers? I would be so ashamed of myself if I was the one responsible for this bug, that I would quit immediately and go apply for a job flipping burgers, because that would be more my skill level. It’s absolutely unbelievable for a company of this size, that so many internet businesses rely on to collect money from their customers, has had a problem of this magnitude for 10 days and counting. Un. Flipping. Believable.  

The real question here (besides the apparent lack of ability to fix a basic HTML form) is why did it take PayPal a week just to document the issue?

Last year I was not able to claim payments received via PayPal and the overall outage became a huge story in the PayPal developer community.

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