By Sharla Sikes

Jajah, a provider of voice over IP phone service, recently launched its click-to-call buttons designed specially for eBay.

Almost immediately, eBay—which owns peer-to-peer VoIP provider Skype—smacked down Jajah’s offering.

Jajah designed click-to-call buttons customized for the giant auction site which do not require any downloads, software or hardware. The buttons were designed for eBay sellers to add to their eBay stores and auctions to provide easy communication between buyers and sellers, at the seller’s expense. Jajah’s buttons are customizable.

“In auctions, buyers and sellers must communicate to close a deal. With JAJAH buttons, everyone who wants to buy or sell online now has the freedom to talk-all you need is a phone,” said JAJAH co-founder Roman Scharf.

Originally, the buttons were intended for placement in the “meet the seller” section, and were already implemented by some sellers. Within days, eBay removed the buttons, because apparently they “Violated the Ebay Inappropriate Links policy” since “links or other connections to live chat systems are not permitted.”

Jajah claims the real reasoning was eBay’s partnership with Skype.

 “Our vision was simply to bring voice communication to one of the world’s greatest marketplaces for eCommerce,” said Scharf. “With millions of registered users, Jajah is hardly an ‘inappropriate’ organization. We were seeing great excitement for Jajah buttons on eBay and we are disappointed that some of our users’ listings are now being removed.”

Jajah buttons can be used on other web sites, blogs or in e-mail if the user registers with Jajah or logs into an existing account.

Could part of the problem be eBay’s recent devaluation of Skype?

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