Poor sellers

Question

Been with EBay as a buyer for the last 20 years but this year , there has been a lot of poor sellers with no delivery on the item purchase , item defective, item ship to the wrong address, no responses when you as a buyer is trying to get some answers. Also you place make offers with no response. EBAY needs to step up and stop this Craigslist selling on their website

eburtonlab · Answer

It is better to vet your sellers yourself than to rely entirely on eBay to do that for you, particularly if you think (as I do) that eBay is not doing enough right now to limit new or unproven seller accounts.

Although sellers are not required to respond to offers or answer questions, a seller that does not answer a reasonable question prior to a bid or purchase is actually providing you with valuable information about the seller's suitability for doing business.

In general, you can avoid a lot of headaches by choosing to purchase only from established sellers that have recent and past positive feedback as a seller for selling items in the same category that you intend to buy. If someone is selling a dozen apple watches, but has no feedback, or only has feedback as a buyer, or only has feedback for selling dress patterns or fishing lures (actual examples I have seen), perhaps wait until they have a track record of positive feedback for selling electronics before you buy from them.

You might miss out on a good deal from a new seller once in a while, and nothing can guarantee that you won't still run into an issue anyway, but you can avoid a lot of potential problems by choosing to do business with established sellers. Anyone can put together a listing that looks nice -- it is not hard at all to simply copy an existing listing -- but it is much harder to create a history of consistent sales and positive feedback.

For more experienced sellers, you can learn a lot about the sort of seller you are dealing with by checking the seller's feedback page to see where the seller is registered and to notice if the seller has any negative feedback. If you see negatives indicated in the table of recent feedback, you can choose to exclusively see each type of comment by clicking on the numbers shown in the table. Reading negative or neutral comments can often tell you if a seller has a pattern of problems with items not matching the descriptions, canceled orders, late deliveries or item location misrepresentation.

If a seller has a pattern of too many serious negatives -- or just not enough positive history -- it is often better to find another seller with a better track record to do business with.