As if you need e-bay to have an online auction. You don't. Just describe your goods for sale on a web page and wait for your customers to google for what they are looking for.

Amazon and Yahoo have both developed their independent payment systems.

They're not that difficult to set up.

The dotGNU cashbox system will allow any merchant to track "in-store credit" for their customers.

TipJar continues to be the only system that:

• does not charge a percentage from either the giver or the receiver of a tipjar transaction
• does not share customer e-mail addresses with mass marketers
• uses only collected funds, preventing "chargebacks" from occuring with tipjar transactions
• has anonymity features built in to allow anonymous giving
• allows definition of non-email-address nicknames, and definition of "minimum acceptable tip", in effect creating a sender-pays messaging system that has been operating since 1996
• ... more later ...