Why do some buyers never pay?
Since I've started selling around this time of year I've noticed I've had to deal with a frustrating amount of occasions where I make a sale, and then the buyer just ghosts me, never actually paying for the item and never responding to my attempts to reach out to them until eventually I'm forced to cancel the order. I don't know why some of these people purchase something that they clearly had no intention of actually paying for, but as a seller it is extremely annoying.
32 comments
june_elizabeth1971
·2 years agoIve had that happen a few times. I just add them to my block list and then won't ever have to deal with them again.
soh.maryl
·2 years agoWhy bother with attempts to reach out to them? Does that often result in the buyer waking up and paying?
You have the option to cancel on day #4, citing buyer did not pay as the reason.
Or you can just set your requirements to have that done automatically.
a_c_green
·2 years agoAgreed; eBay bombards the buyer with numerous notifications about paying, so there's no need to pile on to that with your own messages, especially if the unpaid buyer is already cranky about all the eBay alerts.
One thing I have not seen a lot of on these discussion boards is a buyer complaining that he got an Unpaid slap because no one told him that he'd won the auction.
reallynicestamps
·2 years agoOh gosh, my friend Duncan is a night shelf stocker.
He can be... eloquent... about those.
theteamsetguy
·2 years ago@mpssupershop ,
Here are some good reasons.
1. They got in a bad car accident and is in the hospital.
2. They died.
3. They bid on your item and by the time the auction ends they forgot about it.
4. They went out of town.
5. Their wife, husband, boy friend, or girl friend goes what were you thinking?
6. They got fired or laid off from their job.
7. Their dog ate their only credit card so they can’t pay.
8. They got arrested and is in jail.
9. Their needed car repairs and they no longer have the money.
10. Their spouse served them with divorce papers.
11. They needed the money for something else.
ed8108
·2 years ago12. They realized that they don't really need what they purchased & can live comfortably without it.
a_c_green
·2 years agoOne other possibility that I'm not sure was mentioned here yet was an auction buyer who sprays bids across multiple auctions for the same or similar items, pays for whichever one he wins for the lowest price, and ghosts all the others.
As for Fixed Price deadbeats, check the Immediate Payment Required box near the bottom of the listing form, and no one will be able to yank your item off the market without actually paying you for it first.
As already noted, if you have Make Offer on your listing, be sure that you have the new seller option selected to require buyers to provide their payment info to eBay along with their offer, so that you will be paid immediately if you decide to accept the offer.
dbfolks166mt
·2 years agoOne other possibility that I'm not sure was mentioned here yet was an auction buyer who sprays bids across multiple auctions for the same or similar items, pays for whichever one he wins for the lowest price, and ghosts all the others.
This may be one of the downsides to the autopay option. Bidders can still shotgun the auctions with bids. If they win more than one they can simply request the seller cancel for the ones they don't want. If seller sends the item they could simply lie, not that a buyer would do that, and open a NAD. Hopefully, however at some point eBay would catch on to buyers that were doing this and suspend them but that is probably not going to happen.
dbfolks166mt
·2 years agoMy follow up regarding the autopay feature. I am not sure if it has been fully deployed but if you enable the following in your account settings it will require the offeror or bidder to provide payment information before they make an offer or a bid. When the auction ends or you accept the offer the payment is automatic similar to BIN/IPR. Be aware that enabling these comes with some trade offs which you can find in multiple posts on this forum.
To activate from your account settings go to selling preferences and click on it.
Scroll down to Your buyers and managing who can buy from you and click on the edit
Scroll down until you see the following two boxes, check them and hit submit.
billb1293
·2 years agoDoes the checkbox (there is only one now) change the default to IPR for even "buy now"? Or do I have to double check each listing. I am not a high volume seller but pretty familiar with the settings and do not see it anywhere else.
Thanks
dbfolks166mt
·2 years agoSince my original response eBay has removed that option. To the best of my knowledge IPR on BIN items must be set for each individual listing. There is no option in your accounting settings to automatically make it a default.
dbfolks166mt
·2 years agoI have responded to posts like this so many times I am surprised I don't have a canned answer already typed out but I will after this.
First you should be aware that due to the constant seller complaints about non-paying bidders or offerors eBay is in the process of implementing an auto-pay process for best offers and auctions that should virtually eliminate non-payers. However there are tradeoffs. I will post how to set that up in another response.
As others have stated there have been and probably always will be sport bidders or competitors that run up your auction price so their items look better. However, unlike a BIN item where you know that the buyer is sitting at the computer or on the APP offers or bids can be placed and then the buyer goes off and does something else. Several things can happen in that time span. First worldwide about 150,000 people die every day, multiple times that many wind up in the hospital with medical emergencies or as a result of an accident. People are hit by natural disasters: hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, blizzards, earthquakes......... People have family emergencies that require their focus and attention. Over the years I have had non-payers who were impacted or involved in one of the above. I always reach out to the buyer/bidder to find out why they didn't pay. I have gotten responses back from several who had legit reasons, some apologized and asked if I still had the item and actually followed up with purchasing and paying for it the second time around. Probably the worse case was a family member that contacted me to let me know that the person who had placed the bid had passed away of a major heart attack.
While I still get an occasional non-payer I still use the auction format almost exclusively mostly for time management. It has worked well for me over the years.
inhawaii
·2 years agoWhy do some buyers never pay?
Human nature.
It's been going on since the beginning of auctions.
tobaccocardyahoo
·2 years agoBuyer's remorse has many causes.
Often the buyer looks at what they bought, slaps their head and says "What was I thinking".
At other times, they discover that if they had just looked at a few more items for sale, they would have found a better price.
Sometimes, their life partner slaps them across the head and says "What were you thinking"/
mpssupershop
OP2 years agoIf that's the case then why don't they just cancel the order so that I can relist it for someone who actually does want it to find? Why just leave the item in that state of limbo until eventually Ebay autocancels the order and penalizes them?
tinsoldierunderground
·2 years agoThere are also the sport bidders, those who like to run up the price for fun... These cretins never plan on winning, but they sometimes do by accident.
chapeau-noir
·2 years agoThis subject has been talked about over and over down through the last 20 years. The bottom line is that the only remedy is to do what most sites do - set up for immediate payment required, which is the old fashioned way of doing things, and skip the auctions and the rest of it.
Until eBay has a bundling features for buy it now/immediate payment so that people can combine purchases easily and say make an offer, or allows the item to be available for purchase until the individual offering for it actually pays, it's not going to change.
iamalwaysright
·2 years agoBecause nowadays people like to always think they are too busy for many things like these. And frankly they don't care.
reallynicestamps
·2 years agowhy don't they just cancel the order so that I can relist it
Because they are thoughtless dimwits.
It's like the person who picks up a box of cereal in the supermarket then changes their mind and leaves it on a shelf in the detergent aisle.
Someone has to return that cereal to its proper place*, but thoughtless dimwits have trouble forming that concept.
You can set up your listings so that a buyer must make Immediate Payment or the listing remains visible and available to the first paying buyer.
You can set up your Auctions so that any bidder must register their method of payment before their bid is accepted.
You can set up your listings to automatically Cancel Unpaid Items after 96 hours.
All of these have some drawbacks, but all solve the problem you posted.
*The supermarket I usually use has bins near the cashiers, so that unwanted items can be returned to the shelves quickly and efficiently. And those bins are usually full, so there are a lot of decisions being made at the register.
a_c_green
·2 years agoIs that actually in effect yet? I've seen the new checkboxes on the Buyer Requirements page, and (in my buying account) I am now always asked to verify my intended payment details before I can submit an offer, but (so far) I have not been asked for payment details when bidding in an auction.
My nightmare is swooping in to snipe an auction with 4 seconds left to go, only to hit a payment details confirmation screen first and thus miss the ending of the auction. That hasn't happened yet.
It may be simply that I got selected for the first group for Make Offer payment info, but not the first group for Auction Bidding payment info. Exactly when I'm going to start getting hit for bidding payment info, I'm not sure.
theteamsetguy
·2 years ago@reallynicestamps ,
How about the guy that leaves the 🥩 or ice cream in the detergent aisle?
soh.maryl
·2 years agoOr the one who evidently somehow lost a package of pork chops (not recently) that I discovered when I dropped my card at the checkout and stooped to retrieve it from the floor?
angelno_11
·2 years agoMany of us avoid auctions for this reason.
why don't they just cancel the order
Probably because they have no incentive to cancel the order.
Why just leave the item in that state of limbo until eventually Ebay autocancels the order and penalizes them
Probably because eBay does not really penalize them.
I don't know why some of these people purchase something that they clearly had no intention of actually paying for
In some cases, they are comparison shopping. They bid on a number a items, and only pay for the one that turns out to be the best deal.
maxine*j
·2 years agoI suppose there are a number of reasons for non-payment, from the thoughtless to the trollish.
Sell at Fixed Price, Immediate Payment Required, dump "Best Offer," and the whole issue disappears, though.
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iamalwaysright
·2 years agoDon't manually cancel the order. Let ebay do it automatically after 4 days and the buyer will get a penalty strike. Doing it any other way let's these buyers off the hook to do that again over and over.
soh.maryl
·2 years agoWhen/if the seller manually cancels after 4 days, citing "buyer did not pay" as the reason, the buyer DOES get a strike, so did not understand your response.
Have never heard of eBay doing it "automatically" after four days. What if, for instance, I, the seller, would like to give the buyer a few more days to pay, especially if the buyer has sent a message begging me to give them a day or two longer?
mpssupershop
OP2 years agoI have dealt with this situation before and most of the time, the day they say they'll be able to pay will come and go and still no payment, and if they do still respond they always seems to have some kind of excuse why they need a few more days. My advice is in these situations to put your foot down and cancel the order if they haven't paid by the time Ebay will let you cancel the order for non-payment because honestly if they can't pay for it, they shouldn't have placed the order in the first place.
iamalwaysright
·2 years agoI haven't done auctions in a while and always have IPR on my listings. I remember when UPI's went away ebay was cancelling auction purchases for me automatically by default after 4 days. I was able to change this in settings. Is that not the case anymore?
mtgraves7984
·2 years agoHere's the link to automating the NP cancellation. >> Preferences for items awaiting payment (ebay.com)
Regarding the scenario you speak of, here's eBay's tip: You can exclude certain buyers from having orders canceled automatically when you enable Preferences for items awaiting payment on your selling account.
a_c_green
·2 years ago@soh.maryl : That option has been available for many years. In the past it was called the Unpaid Item Assistant, a seller option that you could activate, and which would open an Unpaid Item dispute automatically for you after 2 days (minimum) from the purchase or auction win. The buyer would then get 4 additional days to pay, after which the process would automatically close it out and award an Unpaid slap to the buyer. You could postpone the start of the dispute process beyond 2 days (I had mine set to 4) or cancel it for any buyer on request if desired.
Finally, a couple of years ago, more or less, eBay shortened the Unpaid process even more, and now the buyer has a 4-day minimum within which to pay, but after that the seller can slam the case immediately, with an Unpaid slap on the buyer at that time. The old Unpaid Item Assistant has now morphed into the "Preferences for items awaiting payment page" seen here:
https://www.ebay.com/Cancel/Preference/UnpaidPurchase
That page includes a field where you can enter buyer IDs who will be exempt from the process, such as buyers who have requested a longer payment window from you.
soh.maryl
·2 years agoThank you for that information. Am aware of the way the unpaid process works currently.
Guess I was not selling back when you could have a UPI opened automatically.
a_c_green
·2 years agoYou're welcome... 🙂 When they transitioned from the old Unpaid Item Assistant to the current cancel process, anyone who had activated the old Assistant for automatic use was grandfathered into the new process automatically. Sellers who were not using the old process automatically have the option of using the new one, but they'll need to turn it on first via the Unpaid Purchase Preferences page.