@hip_fab_wow wrote:
As insurance covers all transactions, what they're probably doing with our money is making multi-million dollar trades on the foreign exchange.
The official reason is that if a transaction issue occurs, eBay or PayPal can return the original funds to the buyer (if the account is empty, PayPal still have to provide the refund and then have to try their luck with the seller), so, it's not to protect either buyer or seller, it's to protect eBay / PayPal (i.e. they are acting purely out of self-interest).
The possibility of hijacked accounts would be one of the reason why it still occurs with sellers who have been long-term members of eBay, but not sold so much in recent history. It would also be more cost effective and 'fair' to apply these parameters universally, than looking at things on a case by case basis.
That's relatively reasonable logic, I guess, but in practicality I can understand the issues it causes, and even if I can understand the underlying motivation (or some of it) I wouldn't be surprised if they do it because there's opportunity for other benefits.
Then again they may just be slowly trying to get sellers used to the idea of not having immediate access to funds, as well - if ebay take over the payment processing side of things when they have the opportunity to, I expect we'll have a system similar to other sites, where the y collect the money paid by the buyer, and disburse it to sellers at set intervals.
