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Recently eBay announced that it is increasing purchase protection from $1000 to $2,000 for qualified transactions on eBay.com. But it will no longer offer purchase protection for non-PayPal transactions. Why? Well, eBay claims that other payment services are less safe than PayPal.

But the decision probably has more to do with the fact that the company make roughly twice the money on sellers who use PayPal. It charges sellers the usual listing fees, plus additional fees when sellers accept payment through PayPal Premier or Business accounts (and eBay is making it harder and harder to sell anything on eBay using PayPal Personal, its free account).

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Most of us want to be more charitable, though somehow giving to a random charity often leaves us with too many unanswered questions: Where specifically does my money really go? How much of it actually makes it to the end destination?

Enter San Francisco based non-profit Kiva.org: a peer-to-peer microfinance gateway, which combines the Nobel Peace Prize concept of microcredit with the power of the Internet to facilitate micro-lending to small business owners in developing countries. Here’s how it works:

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eBay is making it nearly impossible for sellers to request payment through Google Checkout. The online auction giant updated and renamed its Safe Payments policy (now called “Accepted Payment Policy”) this week in an effort to add Google’s new payment service, Google Checkout, to its list of online payment methods not permitted. The reason?

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According to the Wall Street Journal (subscription required), Google will introduce a "test" version (or is that beta?) of Gbuy as early as this week, according to those familiar with the situation. The service will undoubtedly compete directly with PayPal and is set to initially attract customers by offering an unspecified rebate to those who use GBuy to complete their online purchases. Also, Google plans to integrate GBuy with its current advertising network, as yet another incentive.

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Link: Google Checkout: PayPal Killer?.

It looks like Google Checkout may be in the making.  The speculation is that it is a free shopping cart that lets website owners accept payment and track sales through Google Analytics.

The New York Post released rumors of Microsoft’s possible take over of eBay. Of course, only "unnamed" sources were used as references. Nonetheless, any news to do with the Microsoft / Google wars causes quite the stir online. Check out some of these responses found at CNET’s News.com.

PayPal, one of the leading companies in online payment solutions, has created a very useful resource for understanding "spoof" emails. Spoof emails are most often fake emails designed to look like an authentic request for information. For example, an email stating that you need to update your bank account information by clicking on a link when, in fact, the email is not from your bank and is instead an attempt by a person to trick you into surrendering your personal financial information. As PayPal deals with this issue daily, it has compiled the following 10 ways to recognize spoof emails:

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