My buyer requirement page still shows this option,
@martin2001
Your page shows both?
*Require buyers to provide a payment method before they place a bid.
*Require buyers to provide a payment method before they make an offer.
The one that was removed for most everyone was the one for placing a bid.
The one that remains pertains to making offers. From what others are reporting, if you keep the remaining one regarding offers set to YES, it still requires a buyer to put up a payment source, but they will likely no longer be auto billed. eBay is still tweaking this with the "accepted offers turning into YOU SENT AN OFFER scenario where the buyer is not told that the offer was accepted, but rather shows up to the buyer as YOU HAVE AN OFFER...... yada yada as has been going on for a few weeks and causing general confusion.
The other thing mentioned in the Seller Update was as follows: "We're actively testing solutions that require buyers to provide payment information before they submit bids to reduce unpaid items in Auctions."
This has in the past been directly related to the "preference" that is now missing. I was enrolled AS A BUYER into forced participation in order to bid. Which of course was not smoother, enhanced, for my benefit whatsoever as eBay proclaimed. If I participated, it would mean I pay full price for every auction I won from the same seller. So I just didn't participate, where in the past I would bid on many items at a time.
Now that requirement for auctions appears to be GONE, so I wonder what else eBay has come up with to "reduce unpaid items". What ever it is, it does not appear that it is going to be a seller's choice, since the preference that could be turned off so combined shipping could commence has been eliminated.
The one for making offers that they have been playing with, and have now said once again will reduce unpaid items is nothing of the sort. The buyer can simply ignore it, and not pay at all, and probably will if they want to combine multiple items.
eBay has also been trying to convince sellers to offer shipping discounts to buyers. They even had people call sellers on the phone trying to get them to offer the eBay discounted shipping label price to buyers as some sort of incentive to increase sales. The best way to offer discounted shipping to buyers has always been combined shipping (paying $6 for ten pairs of earrings instead of $50). For some reason, eBay seems determined to get rid of combined shipping. Do they want the extra 40 cents per listing from the seller who gets ten individual payments from the same buyer bad enough to discourage multiple sales? Do they benefit enough by counting ten sales from a buyer for their GMV total instead of ONE combined order/payment to turn be able to afford turning buyers away?
For some reason I am not sure any of this dog and pony show is all about unpaid items.
Regards,
