So is immediate payment for seller-initiated offers now fully implemented or not??
I didn't get any replies to this since posting it yesterday in the seller update thread. This buyer still hasn't paid. No big whoop but I'm still very curious to know whether this thing is in full effect or not.
To anyone who doesn't know, this is NOT about buyer-initiated offers, only seller- ones. Supposedly all sellers and all buyers are (or will be affected), to where if a seller sends an offer, the interested buyers get 3 choices: Ignore, (officially) decline, or pay NOW, no more "accept and pay later", so unless/until someone pays, the listing remains visible and available for purchase at the original BIN listed price.
It is NOT something a seller can switch 'off' in their preference settings.
I am NOT asking who likes or dislikes it, or why. Plenty of threads about that already.
Just asking if anyone else is seeing it in action or not. -Assuming this buyer of mine is not EIS, then I'm either not "rolled in" yet, or the feature is not fully functional yet.
gurlcat
OP2 years ago@valueaddedresource So what are your thoughts on that thing Chuck said? ^ About items being unavailable while offers are "under consideration." ^
mr_lincoln
·2 years ago@gurlcat , @valueaddedresource , @chapeau-noir , @dbfolks166mt
I don't know if it has been rolled out across the board for Auctions yet but as @dbfolks166mt mentioned they have removed the choice to turn Auto-pay ON or OFF for the Auction flow on my account:
My Auto-pay for Offers is OFF, I only use the Send offers eligible feature, NOT the regular Best Offer feature. Items go to my Awaiting payment file and sit for a while before being paid and move to the Awaiting shipment file.
I've used the Tell us what you think link on the Buyer requirement page to tell those .... people ... to put the choice for Auto-pay on Auctions BACK in the Seller's control. My unpaid item % is extremely low for the items I sell.
valueaddedresource
·2 years ago@gurlcat today's eBay for Business podcast might have your answer.
https://community.ebay.com/t5/eBay-for-Business/Ep-283-What-s-New-For-The-eBay-Mobile-App/ba-p/34314267
Griff was talking to Chuck Van Pelt from the Seller Advocacy Team about the changes to seller initiated offers announced in the Winter update and Chuck said it's been rolled out to about 50% of users now.
Chuck: Absolutely. Well, seller initiated offer is gonna benefit from these efforts now. And so when a buyer accepts an offer, the buyer will have to check out and complete the payment when they accept the offer. This will reduce any opportunity for an unpaid item, of course.
Griff: I've already been subjected to this as a buyer and it was quite an easy experience. So I accepted an offer that a seller sent and I had to check out, which I was happy to do. I knew immediately from the buyer perspective and my perspective as a seller that wait, the item is not going to close as sold until I pay for it. This is really great news.
Chuck: Exactly. Yep. Yeah, the transaction will complete right at the time of acceptance. If the payment is not successfully completed, the great thing is the item will continue to be available for purchase in the marketplace.
Griff: I love that. Yeah, that's a great thing. I must be part of a group during this rollout where my user ID was part of that because I'm seeing it already as a, as a buyer.
Chuck: Yeah. Well that's very observant and you're one of the lucky 50% currently. So some sellers may have noticed a recent change which is rolled out at 50% right now. You've probably heard this before. We don't always roll things out at a hundred percent. We like to do it gradually and make sure everything's going smooth. We like to compare before and after. Currently items with offers under consideration will still be available for purchase until a payment is received from a buyer. So basically that means in the past, offers under consideration would take an item out of the marketplace and that's not gonna be the case anymore.
Griff: Do we tell buyers that? Do we say, Hey, if you don't pay for this, it can get snatched out from under you?
Chuck: We do. And I think that you're gonna see more messaging along those lines. The idea is we want to create urgency to finalize a deal. Right. We want buyers to understand that there are other interested parties and they may come in and get that item out from under you.
ittybitnot
·2 years agoAnd so when a buyer accepts an offer,
@valueaddedresource
When this new policy is in effect, it would be incorrect to mention "accepts" in the context used in that discussion. The choice will be to ignore, decline, or pay. There will be no "accept" button that would allow multiple items to be invoiced for one shipping cost. Each will have to be paid individually. It still requires a conscious action by the buyer. It is not auto-billed, but rather "immediate payment required" to use a process descriptor for which we are familiar.
As @gurlcat mentions, there are no answers from eBay appearing in the Seller Update thread. We don't even know if they are still changing BUYER GENERATED OFFERS into SELLER GENERATED OFFERS. There have been a just a couple of threads the last couple of days that suggest "auto billing" for both buyer generated offers and auctions may have resumed.
valueaddedresource
·2 years ago@ittybitnot I definitely understand, but those were not my words, I was just copying the transcript from the podcast....might not be a bad idea to leave a comment there for @griff@ebay.com to clear that up on the next episode though. 😉
I was just providing the info that according to Chuck Van Pelt, those changes to seller initiated offers are only currently ramped to about 50% of users to answer @gurlcat's question about whether this was fully implemented or not.
ittybitnot
·2 years ago, but those were not my words,
@valueaddedresource
I know that, and truly did not intend to suggest they WERE yours. I was merely pointing out that their reference to "so when a buyer accepts an offer" was rather misleading. It would have been more accurate to say that all seller generated offers will now be IPR. No need to tell anyone how "great this is" and "how lucky we are" now that there is no possibility for combining orders/shipping (and sellers get that new and wonderful non-refundable 40 cent charge per item instead of per order).
I suppose I am just OLD and come from a generation where "sins of omission" of this sort were equated with straight up lying. LOL.... That is why when eBay left out the consequences for their "New Improved Smoother Checkout" pitch to buyers for the auto-billing scheme, I was sooooo angry.
toomuchstuffagain35
·2 years agoYeah, great "improvement" there, just not for sellers who used offers to be able to do combined shipping when ebay's system didn't allow it.
gurlcat
OP2 years agoThanks yet again for giving the exact answer requested! Funnily enough, my buyer of that item finally paid while I was reading the post! So I checked .... and no, they are not an EIS buyer, so I must not be among the lucky 50%, LOL.
But I noticed something odd in that conversation, not sure what to make of it. Toward the end, Chuck said:
Currently items with offers under consideration will still be available for purchase until a payment is received from a buyer. So basically that means in the past, offers under consideration would take an item out of the marketplace and that's not gonna be the case anymore.
"Under consideration" -what?? That makes it sound like a listing disappears from search results as soon as the seller sends an offer to even one watcher, and nobody else can even see it during the 48 hours while that offer recipient "consider" the offer. It was my understanding that the listing remains visible and purchasable to everyone at the full BIN price unless/until an offer recipient ACCEPTED the offer; then the listing was officially ended even if they didn't end up paying (in which case the seller would have to relist it all over again). But was I wrong about that this whole time? Are my listings with current sent offers under a temporary cloak to the rest of the world?!
chapeau-noir
·2 years agoI have one of those around the house, too, a seller-initiated offer. Will they pay?
Whooooooo knows.
dbfolks166mt
·2 years agoI have been trying to determine the same thing. I use the auction format almost exclusively and initially had turned off the auto-pay option in my account settings but I do know they removed that capability, again without any notice.
From all appearances, and based on the payments on my most recent auctions, I get the feeling that they have disabled the functionality. I expect the postings about non-paying buyers will begin to increase again.
gurlcat
OP2 years agoYeah I also have an unpaid auction. -Just by a matter of hours though. Hopefully they are totally done with THAT pre-authorization thing because expecting buyers to do it against a ticking time clock is ridiculous, and I'm pretty sure that even the amount of time they did try it has caused an exodus of some portion of buyers who used to bid on auctions. Even though I marked mine "off" immediately so none of my people had to mess with it, my winning bids in the past 3 or 4 weeks have been shockingly low, maybe half of what the same items would have fetched before all this started.