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Non-paying bidders
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.
30 comments
kh-taylarie
·2 years agoDue to the age of this thread, it will be locked in order to keep discussions current. If you have the same or a similar question/issue we invite you to start a new thread on the topic.
jhmii
·3 years agoWhen I send an offer to a seller it states the it is a binding contract.
When someone send me an offer and I accept, and he refuses to pay, the only choice I'm left with is to cancel the order.
So much for binding contracts.
smallgreens
·3 years agoJust experienced my 3rd non payer out of 4 items that were sold. One item had 2 non payers that won the auction. Can't leave negative feedback and Ebay's solution is "just relist it, you might actually get a legitimate buyer next time". Ebay protects these people to keep their registered bidder numbers up. It must help their stock price. This site has changed so much over the last 20 years, and not for the better! I just wish there was an alternative site.
nulifelady
·3 years agoEbay just gets worse & worse......I'm dealing with a buyer now who cannot understand why an item she JUST BOUGHT is no longer available......these people drive and raise children..
isaiah53-57
·3 years agoYou would think the site could easily do something about this - Question: Do these type of transactions help with higher sales reports for the site?
slippinjimmy
·3 years agoeBay does "do something" they offer Fixed Price listings with Immediate Payment Required.
No, eBay does not include unpaid listings in their financial reports. Unpaid items are not good for sellers, not good for eBay, not good for anyone. eBay did include these unpaid transactions prior to Managed Payments but that ended about 4 years ago.
harafkac0
·3 years agohttps://www.ebay.com/help/selling/listings/creating-managing-listings/setting-buyer-requirements?id=4152&mkevt=1&mkcid=1&mkrid=711-53200-19255-0&campid=5338683477&customid=&toolid=10001
https://www.ebay.com/bmgt/buyerrequirements
harafkac0
·3 years agoHere we go again...
All you as a seller have to do is in your site preferences, set your unpaid item strikes to not allow buyers such as these to bid on your auctions, problem solved.
billsmafiamike17
·3 years agoExperiencing the same here. 11 non-payers recently. Beyond frustrating. I pay to promote most of my listings, and of course eBay doesn't refund those when a sale is cancelled for non-payment.
I give buyers 7 days and send reminders to be polite, professional and cover all my bases.
I think going forward I'm going to use pay to promote much less. I'm also considering researching other online markeplace/auction platforms like PWCC. (I almost exclusively sell sports trading cards).
nobody*s_perfect
·3 years agoDoes that ever help? Most sellers just set their site preferences to automatically cancel a transaction if isn't paid within the required minimum of 4 days. Do you ever have buyers who eventually pay up between day 4 and day 7?
lord_hawkins
·3 years agoYes, this is a big problem. EBay is doing nothing at all. Sellers cannot even give negative feedback ratings when we are forced to cancel the bid. EBay does not care as they use this to claim number of subscribers even though a percentage of them are all scammers and non payers.
We should have a global black list for all these non payers so that all sellers can add it into thier block list.
buyselljack2016
·3 years agoseems that there was such a thing on the interweb at one time.
2 flaws.
Possibly abused by false reporting.
and just because they did not pay me does not mean that they will not pay you.
tpro_2640
·3 years agoAgreed.. Ebay charges the seller for the sell fee, if you cancel the sell and don’t allow the 4 days for them not yo pay. I believe the fee should be charged to the buyer fir not completing purchases unless you choose to cancel when there is zero contact or payment from buyer. You spend your time taking photos and doing your listing fir someone to have no intention of paying and ruin your auction and have you miss a good paying Ebayer. I don’t understand why these non paying bidders are rewarded fir their behavior and the sellers who make up Ebay are penalized for the non paying bidders actions.
a_c_green
·3 years agoWow... 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.
kyle@ebay
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.
gemarakop_trading
·3 years agoMaybe ebay should allow real negatives for non payment. Like automatically. Non payment is a real issue on the site.
soh.maryl
·3 years agoAgain, any seller who has a buyer who has not yet paid after 4 days can cancel on day #5, citing "buyer did not pay" as a reason.
And any seller can set his requirements so that a buyer with two strikes in twelve months cannot bid or buy from him.
When/if any buyer has 23 negatives for nonpayment, that means that the sellers did not use the solutions available to them. Even if a seller doesn't care whether or not he gets paid, he needs to open a case if merely to make things easier for other sellers.
gemarakop_trading
·3 years agoThat will help for sellers looking at an offer. Or canceling bids.
nobody*s_perfect
·3 years agoNonpaying buyers are easily stopped: Wait 4 days, cancel the transaction based on "Buyer hasn't paid," and they get a nonpayment strike. Then you and your fellow comics sellers can set up your site preferences to block bidders/buyers who have gotten 2 or more strikes in the past 12 months. That's far more efficient than ranting to each other (and here) and spending hours on the phone with customer support, who can't do anything about it.
The "3 strikes and you're out" policy disappeared at about the same time as when eBay set up the option to block members based on their strikes history. An increasing proportion of sellers have all of their items set up as fixed price listings with "Immediate payment required," and they don't care how many strikes a buyer has.
nulifelady
·3 years agoIs that buyer going to leave me negative feedback & if they do, can it be removed?
mtgraves7984
·3 years agoI have wasted endless hours reporting a buyer to ebay via phone calls and written chats.
@exlibristoo
Wow. When four clicks would have 1) Cancelled the sale, 2) Cited that the 'Buyer didn't pay', 3) Confirmed and 4) Submitted.
exlibristoo
OP3 years agoOf course I did your "4 click" procedure. I understand how ebay works after 24 yrs. I don't understand, however, why ebay won't remove chronically delinquent non-payers.
dbfolks166mt
·3 years agoOf course I did your "4 click" procedure. I understand how ebay works after 24 yrs. I don't understand, however, why ebay won't remove chronically delinquent non-payers.
Probably because the buyer can simply open another account or use a guest account to purchase. Unlike sellers buyers can use their accounts with a VPN and thwart any attempts by eBay to block them from opening another account or using a guest account.
I would much rather have the occasional non-payment than I would have to deal with a return or a request for a refund. There are a LOT of reasons a buyer may not have paid for the item. Unlike BIN items where you know the buyer is sitting at their computer and made the purchase real-time. With auctions a bid could have been placed early and over the next xx days a lot could have happened. The buyer could have died, had a medical or family emergency, been impacted by a natural disaster........... There is no real way to tell why they did not pay.
As a side note most of the items you are selling, commodity type things, could be listed BIN with immediate payment required and no OBO. Auctions are well suited for some items not so much for others.
kensgiftshop
·3 years agoInstead of violating Ebay policies, if you and those other sellers would cancel the orders for nonpayment, the buyer would be blocked by most sellers.
But, you guys would rather make yourselves look bad and leave negative comments in their feedback.
exlibristoo
OP3 years agoPerhaps 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.
neon65
·2 years agoThis is an old thread I know, but maybe the OP doesn't realize all feedback is removed when you cancel an order due to non payment!!
nobody*s_perfect
·2 years agoI'm pretty sure that the seller's feedback remains:
Once you cancel the order, your item will be relisted automatically if it was a single quantity, Buy It Now item, unless you choose not to relist. We'll also remove any feedback left by the buyer.
https://www.ebay.com/help/selling/getting-paid/resolving-unpaid-items?id=4137
changes21retired
·3 years agoYou're right. Cancel and move on from the waste of time.
Still... there's a satisfaction and completion in being able to leave negative feedback and thus warn others.
Unavailable member
·3 years agoWell, if you mean "cancel because buyer didn't pay," then we're all on board. Cancelling for some other reason just lets the buyer off the hook. And leaving positive feedback with a warning to other sellers does pretty much nothing. It certainly didn't stop the "buyer" from committing to buy your item, did it?
soh.maryl
·3 years ago"A satisfaction in being able to leave negative feedback and thus warn others"?
Wouldn't that so-called satisfaction be somewhat mitigated by the fact that the seller would probably receive a "defect" and the negative wording would be removed?