eBay

exlibristoo · ‎12-10-2022

I have wasted endless hours reporting a buyer to ebay via phone calls and written chats. It has accomplished nothing. I was seller #25 to not receive payment within the previous month and several others followed. Read his negative "positive" feedback and block him from your sales, especially if you sell comic books. Ebay will do nothing but you can.

It used to be 3 strikes and non-paying bidders were out. Now it's very different. Ebay will not remove a paying buyer, even if he pays once out of every 10 winning bids. And, what's happening with cases against non-paying bidders???

Block bidder and save yourself a lot of time and effort.

reallynicestamps · ‎12-10-2022

Did you open an Unpaid Item Dispute?

You can set up your Selling Form to do this automatically after four days.

The deadbeat gets a Strike.

Those 25 other sellers were stupid not to do this, because eBay does not use Feedback to assess accounts.

With 25 UID Strikes, the deadbeat's account would have been closed long since.

reallynicestamps · ‎12-10-2022

I certainly canceled his order. It was only a $10 sale for me

NO.

You don't cancel the sale.

You wait the four days, file the Unpaid Item Dispute, then he get a STRIKE.

Just cancelling does nothing, and he could still leave you feedback for cancelling his transaction.

If you set your Seller Preferences to automatically Block bidders/buyers with Strikes, you don't even see the attempt.

No one ever reads feedback.

EBay doesn't use it to assess accounts.

Other sellers? 85% of us use Fixed Price and don't see FB until there is a purchase. Same for the 15% of Auction transactions, which may also have a Buy It Now option, they don't see FB until there is a purchase either.

The one who might look at feedback is your future customer, who just backbuttoned when he saw those false positives.

itsjustasprain · ‎12-10-2022

@reallynicestamps wrote:
Did you open an Unpaid Item Dispute?
You can set up your Selling Form to do this automatically after four days.
The deadbeat gets a Strike.

Those 25 other sellers were stupid not to do this, because eBay does not use Feedback to assess accounts.
With 25 UID Strikes, the deadbeat's account would have been closed long since.

Unpaid item disputes are no longer used. All a seller needs to do is wait 4 full days before cancelling. Then they can select Buyer did not pay as the reason for cancelling and that is what gives the buyer an Unpaid strike.

It sounds like this buyer has way more than 25 strikes already. Even if some sellers did not wait a full 4 days.

reallynicestamps · ‎12-10-2022

There are other reps.

elizabeth@ebay

mtgraves7984 · ‎12-10-2022

I certainly canceled his order. It was only a $10 sale for me

NO.

You don't cancel the sale.

You wait the four days, file the Unpaid Item Dispute, then he get a STRIKE.

Just cancelling does nothing, and he could still leave you feedback for cancelling his transaction.

@reallynicestamps

Actually, the seller DOES cancel the sale after four days, thus issuing an Unpaid Item strike. (The OP stated somewhere in this thread that that was the method used.) Cancelling for non-payment leaves the deadbeat no chance at feedback.

kensgiftshop · ‎12-10-2022

@exlibristoo wrote:
Perhaps I wasn't clear. I certainly canceled his order. It was only a $10 sale for me but I felt I could help other sellers avoid selling to this non-payer. I always leave negative positive feedback, thinking other sellers will benefit from my mistake. Guess you think it's a waste of time. Fine. Don't read feedback and don't block sellers.

I don't pay any attention to buyers feedback, since all they can receive is positive feedback.

But, I do pay attention to sellers that violate policies.

The best way to avoid nonpayers is to list as a fixed price with immediate payment required.

Have a great day

soh.maryl · ‎12-10-2022

So you don't really care that your feeble attempt to warn other sellers could harm you as a seller. If a seller leaves negative positive FB, the buyer can report it and get it removed. This earns the seller a defect. Can't picture it being worth risking your account to do this.

reallynicestamps · ‎12-10-2022

You are right that the term has become "cancellation".

I regard this as a foolish change, because, while the customer has no input into why the transaction has been ended, using the same term for a non-payment and for a mutual agreement to end the transaction is confusing.

So I will stubbornly continue to use the more accurate terms Dispute or Claim.

I am old and grouchy.

exlibristoo · ‎12-10-2022

Thanks for taking the time to pull up the stats. His stats are the worst I've seen in 24 yrs on ebay. I'm appreciative to have someone out there backing me. The monitor of this community sellers group has eliminated the non-paying bidder's name because we wouldn't want to shame a buyer! The strikes are apparently non-existent. The best we can do is block j..... 8 from our individual bidders lists. Mine is ridiculously long, by the way, but none worse than him.

exlibristoo · ‎12-10-2022

Thanks for your thoughtful advice. It is definitely ebay's party.

nobody*s_perfect · ‎12-10-2022

@exlibristoo wrote: ... The strikes are apparently non-existent.....

The strikes do exist, although they are not shown to other eBay users. Sellers can see evidence of the effectiveness of strikes and the related Buyer Requirement, when they check their Buyer Requirements Activity Log.

kyle@ebay · ‎12-12-2022

@a_c_green wrote:

@exlibristoo wrote:

I have wasted endless hours reporting a buyer to ebay via phone calls and written chats. It has accomplished nothing. I was seller #25 to not receive payment within the previous month and several others followed. Read his negative "positive" feedback and block him from your sales, especially if you sell comic books. Ebay will do nothing but you can.

Wow... I was looking at that guy's feedback before his ID was removed from here, and it is indeed truly staggering, to the point that I decided spend a few minutes walking through his Feedback as a Buyer pages to see what the numbers of false Positives from irate sellers actually are, taking these pages 200 feedbacks at a time:

Page 1: 82 non-payments out of 200 (Past 6 months)

Page 2: 85 non-payments out of 200 (Past 6 months)

Page 3: 16 non-payments out of 200 (Past year)

There are another 500-600 older comments on later pages, all Positives at a glance.

The oldest 16 seller complaints on Page 3 of his buyer feedback end abruptly between 6-12 months ago, beyond which the older comments are all clean, so what I think happened here is that someone else took over the account. Maybe Junior took over after Grandpa died, something like that. Currently there are some genuine Positives interspersed with a sea of false Positives, so as near as I can tell, Junior was simply bidding on multiple auctions and then ignoring the ones that ended too high.

Significantly, there are plenty of mentions by various sellers of cancelling beyond four days, at which time this deadbeat would presumably have received an Unpaid slap each time. (i.e. If the seller waits beyond four days and then cancels with the reason of Buyer Did Not Pay, that slap should have been automatically applied, without the seller needing to do anything more about it themselves.)

I don't know what the default settings are on seller accounts regarding screening of Unpaids, but this deadbeat looks as if he should have been blocked by even the most lenient setting, and yet he's still here. It's hard to say what you have to do as a buyer in order to get yourself booted from eBay, but apparently buying and not paying for things is no longer a real violation.

devon@ebay : Can you find out what the story is about this kind of deadbeat? If you don't have his user ID already, I'm sure the OP can provide it to you, or just send me a PM. He seems to be a poster child for unwanted eBay users, and despite the OP telling us that he's called Customer Service repeatedly (which I know would be your default recommendation), that buyer is still here and rather active.

While I know you cannot discuss specific cases, what would be interesting to know is why a horrendous record of documented non-payment does not seem to be grounds for dismissal.

Hey @a_c_green and @reallynicestamps I'm happy to jump in and help out here! I've gone ahead and reported that member internally to have the appropriate measures taken. As for your question about why they are still on the site right now, without getting into details of an account, there are simply too many variables for us to speculate.

Typically, reporting users like you have been doing is the best route to take. But if you find a situation where that doesn't seem to be working, I would recommend contacting one of our customer service agents to have the member reported through a second avenue.

Kyle,