Power Sellers Unite

luckyalive · Joined: 27 Apr 2008 Posts: 590

The foundation of revolutionarymoneyexchange.com looked good at first as it promised no chargebacks since funds were loaded into each user's account from a credit card or a bank account and then funds were exchanged between user accounts. As there was no direct connection between a buyer's credit card and the payment you received there was no possibility of chargeback. Revolution's user agreement even warned users that once payment was sent there was no way to recover it - a rock solid choice for sellers wanting a barrier against chargebacks.

There had been some speculation when this company was founded that the actual purpose of the company was not to run this company as a long term alternative to credit card companies, but instead the main strategy was to simply threaten credit card companies by undercutting their fee structure and to eventually force a buyout by a credit card company. This certainly appears to be true if you now check the site since it was purchased by American Express and converted to serve.com.

1. Checkout there user agreement - it clearly says you are now liable for chargebacks. The user agreement reminds me a lot like PayPal - the only bonus is that it appears to be on one page, LOL!

http://www.serve.com/Legal.html#Serve_Widget_EULA

2. From looking over the site I would now have to conclude one of two things:

A. AE bought the site to shut it down at a later time - they are running in the short time to hide their long term plans. Sort of like Microsoft buying VirtualPC, releasing some updates, and then shutting it down - they wanted to avoid more antimonopoly suits by giving the appearance they tried to improve the product when in fact they bought it to kill it.

OR

B. AE is totally incompetent when it comes to understanding e-commerence. LOL, they literally expect you to construct custom "widgets" for each item, or groups of items, and include shipping in these widgets, and then install these widgets on your item listing page.

This degree of understanding of how things are sold in the real world is even less than PayPal and that's a pretty low level of ignorance to achieve so I'd really have to go with option B above - revolution was nothing more than a blackmail scheme against the credit card companies that worked - they got bought out and sold all their customers down the river.

AVOID THIS SITE AT ALL COST!

xbaystores · Joined: 30 Oct 2006 Posts: 562

Dwolla has the same model as the old RME.
http://www.powersellersunite.com/about36604.html

elpereles · Joined: 15 Dec 2006 Posts: 1478 Location: Puerto Rico

I was looking the Serve's About Us. Why I add a comparison table of payment methods with "You can earn rewards" and "You can pay for purchases over time" ? :roll:

A Junkee Shoppe · Joined: 10 Jun 2007 Posts: 1265

Google and Authorize.net have that code installation on each item page also. Amazon has the individual item code too. It's for people that don't have access to the sites overall HTML code. My personal web site is on a free hosted site (WebPlus Shops) and I don't have access to the sites overall HTML code. The full code has to be installed in the shopping cart code by the webmaster and because of the time it takes to do that webmasters won't mess with it. They just stick to Paypal and some are installing Google Checkout.

I'd like to relieve myself of Paypal because of the new tax reporting being forced upon the larger sellers. I'm still looking into if us smaller sellers can sell over 200 items a year by using several payment services or if the IRS gets all the sales information from from all the Electronic payment services and calculates if a seller has over 200 sales a year.

I use American Express so I will give their new online payment service a look.

Sometimes a company will buy another company to kill it but most companies will purchase another company to see if it will become popular and generate profits. If AE changed the name that's a good sign that the company was purchased for profits and will be developed over a year or two to see if it becomes popular with online sellers and buyers to generate an income for AE.

A Junkee Shoppe · Joined: 10 Jun 2007 Posts: 1265

The Facebook search engines is just a rumor right now I read on the internet. It wouldn't surprise me if Facebook were going to go head to head with Google. With Bing and Yahoo merging that in itself may be telling a story about Facebook creating its own search engine.

I signed up for the American express online payment system "Serve" yesterday. Looks good to me. http://www.serve.com/ American Express has savings bank account now online and I had already opened up an American Express savings account and funded it so why not the online payment service. http://personalsavings.americanexpress.com/ This new American Express electronic payment system is the closest thing to rival Paypal so I hope it gets some good play on the internet. I'm sure Serve will have its bad policies but Paypal is all bad now.

I already sent an email to Ioffer and Ecrater to see if they would consider installing it. Word of mouth is the best way to get these marketplaces to install a feature.

A Junkee Shoppe · Joined: 10 Jun 2007 Posts: 1265

luckyalive wrote (View Post): › docWrite("quote")
The foundation of revolutionarymoneyexchange.com looked good at first as it promised no chargebacks since funds were loaded into each user's account from a credit card or a bank account and then funds were exchanged between user accounts. As there was no direct connection between a buyer's credit card and the payment you received there was no possibility of chargeback. Revolution's user agreement even warned users that once payment was sent there was no way to recover it - a rock solid choice for sellers wanting a barrier against chargebacks.

There had been some speculation when this company was founded that the actual purpose of the company was not to run this company as a long term alternative to credit card companies, but instead the main strategy was to simply threaten credit card companies by undercutting their fee structure and to eventually force a buyout by a credit card company. This certainly appears to be true if you now check the site since it was purchased by American Express and converted to serve.com.

1. Checkout there user agreement - it clearly says you are now liable for chargebacks. The user agreement reminds me a lot like PayPal - the only bonus is that it appears to be on one page, LOL!

http://www.serve.com/Legal.html#Serve_Widget_EULA

2. From looking over the site I would now have to conclude one of two things:

A. AE bought the site to shut it down at a later time - they are running in the short time to hide their long term plans. Sort of like Microsoft buying VirtualPC, releasing some updates, and then shutting it down - they wanted to avoid more antimonopoly suits by giving the appearance they tried to improve the product when in fact they bought it to kill it.

OR

B. AE is totally incompetent when it comes to understanding e-commerence. LOL, they literally expect you to construct custom "widgets" for each item, or groups of items, and include shipping in these widgets, and then install these widgets on your item listing page.

This degree of understanding of how things are sold in the real world is even less than PayPal and that's a pretty low level of ignorance to achieve so I'd really have to go with option B above - revolution was nothing more than a blackmail scheme against the credit card companies that worked - they got bought out and sold all their customers down the river.

AVOID THIS SITE AT ALL COST!

I checked on your claims that American Express changed Money Exchange user agreement and of coarse they did. Any company that buys out another company will make changes.

The chargeback issue is universal. All internet payment services charge the merchant a fee when a chargeback is filed by a buyer on a credit or debit card. Some payment services charge $10.00 and some charge $20.00 . American Express is just following industry standards.

As for the claim American Express is just out to undercut other credit card companies I don't take that as the case. American Express in my opinion is just getting into the "Game". American Express purchased Money Exchange because they were building up a clientel or Money Exchange was taking a dive and selling out at a lower cost than what it would cost for American Express to build their own internet payment service from scratch. Money Exchange has been on the web a long time also which means it has propagated and that in itself saves tons of time and money.

In my opinion I take it that you are upset that Money Exchange is gone and you have experianced some charge backs from buyers you can't block now. Federal law provides consumers with protection against goods and services that aren't up to snuff and chargebacks are a part of the game.

Lots of buyers use chargebacks to commit fraud against merchants. There are ways to fight this and doing some research is also the name of the game.

American Express in my opinion is just entering the internet money transfer game and financial companies that don't enter the payment service game are cutting their own throats.

Paypal type member to member instant payments are always to way to go to fight credit card chargebacks but most payment services start offering some type of buyer protection with a resolution center and always rule in the favor of the buyer since solid proof can't be offered up by the merchant. Most buyers are honest but there are a percentage of buyers that are out to "Shop Lift" any way they can.