@englishrosegardens wrote:It's not against policy to offer a discount for using your preferred payment method. If you go through one of their selling tutorials it's in there that it's allowed. I was quite surprised to read it but it was there in black & white.
Yes it is - I suspect the tutorials are a little outdated, but if you go to the Avoiding eBay fees help page http://pages.ebay.com.au/help/policies/listing-circumventing.html then click on "Payment Surcharges", it shows this (updated January 2014) :
It has been a common tactic for scammers to use, and usually they'd just instruct the buyer to do a direct deposit and pay the amount less the discount, so without issuing a new invoice - with FVF on P&H now, though, I could see a few sellers finding themselves is that position.
I have seen some offering bonus items for direct deposit payments, I'm not too sure where that would stand with eBay's current policies. Technically, it's not a discount, and there's nothing expressly against it, but I would not be overly surprised if eBay did take it as discouraging other payment methods and issued a policy violation, going by their current track record / decision making process (i.e. often lacking any form of logic).
One seller I used to buy from offered extras for bank deposit, but the bonuses weren't able to sway me from my own preference (PayPal). It was kind of a volatile item to buy on eBay, though (precious metal), and really, I just wanted the item I was buying, so offering me extras to pay the same amount in a less safe (for me) way didn't do it for me. 
@englishrosegardens wrote:I stand corrected. Maybe the tutorial has changed since I last read it.
I hope so, but doubt it, eBay are notoriously lax in that department, unfortunately 😞 , which just goes on to create situations where someone is under the impression what they're doing is perfectly fine, only to find out the hard way eBay now have a problem with it. 
