In accordance with the new policy that was announced and introduced on October 20, 2008 eBay started blocking those listings that are still offering to accept paper payments. Under the new Accepted Payments policy sellers should have removed the previous text before January 15, 2009. Starting Thursday two weeks ago eBay is checking those listings where in the additional checkout instructions sellers still offer banned payment methods.

While some Internet subscribers as well as merchants expressed their concern about the system’s potential errors that may, for instance, occur when it run across the word ‘check’ in such a phrase like “check out my Store”, eBay assured that they are taking measures to block only those listings that actually contain wrong payment instructions. They said in their blog: “We're making the filters as smart as possible to take context into account. For example, we might block on the phrase "personal check" instead of "check" because it is more clearly a paper payment method.”

So far eBay haven’t blocked all the listings with the paper payment offering. The Internet auction advised that they are ramping up the listing blocks and urgently recommended to the sellers to update their texts. The post runs: “All sellers should remove any remaining paper payment methods from their item description. But if your sellers should happen to still have paper payment methods in the "additional checkout instructions" section, they should put a special priority on getting those listings updated.”