offers

[sel0262]

I haven't been very active on ebay for a while.  Recently I've found a few things I've wanted to make offers on.  I'm having to complete a transaction through paypal before I can submit my offer.  I thought I was making na offer NOT a purchase.  One seller told me that this has something to do with my account settings.  I can't find anything regarding submitting offers in my account settings.  Can someone please tell me if this is the new norm or have I missed something in my account settings?  

[mr_lincoln]

Hi @sel0262 ,

Eventually this will be the norm across the board.  eBay announced this feature recently in the Winter Seller Update, excerpt below.  While you may not be someone who fails to pay for your items there are and have been plenty who have not paid for their items through the Offer process or Auction style listings.  This new feature (which they started testing last October) is for the Offer process, not Auctions.

Reducing unpaid items for accepted offers

We’re continuing work we started in 2021 to reduce unpaid items on eBay, which we know has been a long-standing challenge for many of you.

In October 2021, we piloted a new process for collecting payment from a buyer automatically following acceptance of their offer. To do this we asked the buyer for payment and shipping details in the Best Offer flows. In the coming weeks, we plan to expand our coverage and include more buyers, which should further reduce unpaid items from buyer offers.

By mid-year we will also start collecting payment details in other Best Offer scenarios, including counteroffers and Offers to buyers. These changes will be applied automatically for buyers, so you don't need to update or make changes to your listings.

We’re listening to our seller community, and we're on a journey to make things better for you. Managing payments for our users places eBay in a better position to collect payment for buyer commitments.

Regards,

Mr. L

[woodland_gnome · Accepted solution]

You are making a purchase when you make an offer and the seller accepts it.   Too many people were doing that and not paying for their purchase (especially spammers who were doing so to get around the immediate payment requirement of most Buy It Now purchases) so eBay is now testing requiring pre-authorization of payment for those buyers in the test group (making offers to those sellers who have not opted out of it).  This puts a "hold" on your payment account in the amount of the purchase (plus estimated s/h and tax) but the funds are not actually removed from your account unless and until the seller accepts.  This being a test (an extended one that has been going on for a few months but still a test) there are many bugs to work out:  the hold tend to be put on and then ignored with the payment being transacted separately instead of as a "settlement" of the hold so the hold sticks around reducing your "available balance" (which is double reduced if actual payment goes through) until it expires; sometimes the payment is made automatically and it seems sometimes it's not; discounts for combined shipping are made very hard to impossible; etc.