PayPal must compete says ACCC 13 June 2008 4:45PM Jason Bryce PayPal sought to define its market widely as virtually the entire online payments space. The ACCC has rejected that view and said: "For the purposes of assessing this notification, the ACCC considers it sufficient to note that PayPal currently competes (to varying degrees) with a range of online payment providers to supply services which facilitate the transaction function on online marketplaces in Australia."Under that definition, PayPal, with five million members, is obviously a dominant player in its market as well.The ACCC quotes Nielsen figures from 2007: 31 per cent of shoppers preferred PayPal, 44 per cent used credit cards or debit cards and 11 per cent used direct debit or electronic funds transfer.PayPal competitor Paymate has also been a beneficiary of the eBay army's anger about The Project."Our business has been growing steadily over the last year; then just over the last couple of months we have seen a real spike in new business," said Paymate's managing director Dilip Rao last night, "and I have a lot of emails from new customers saying they object to the PayPal plan on principle."