Problem with one of my sales

[roberts77]

I recently sold a Barbie on EBAY as BUY IT NOW. I waited 2 days for payment and never received it. I sent a messag to buyer asking them to pay and contact me regarding the purchase, with no response. I sent another message advising them that EBAY requires them to pay in 48 hours, and since I have had no contact I was relisting the item. I have since resisted the item, but the doll still shows in sold. I assume because of this I will still have to pay EBAY fees. There is no way to contact EBAY directly, so am asking for your help with this matter. I am fairly new to selling and don't know how to handle this situation.

Thank you for your help.

Shari

[posting_hitch · Accepted solution]

Things you should have done before you listed any of your items for sale, and certainly before you re-listed your item:

1. Set your Preferences to "require payment within 2 days."

2. Set your Preferences to opt in to eBay's Unpaid Item Assistant, so that, when a purchase isn't paid within your "payment required within 2 days" time period, eBay will automatically send a message / e-mail to the buyer, informing him or her that an Unpaid Item case has been opened for the purchase. At that point, the buyer will have 4 days to pay for the item. If the payment is not received in that time, eBay will automatically close the case, in your favor, and your item will be freed up for re-listing. If the buyer does pay within that 4-day period, you ship the item off to the buyer, but might want to consider adding the buyer's eBay I.D. to your Blocked Buyer & Bidder list, so that he or she can no longer buy, or bid on, your items.

In looking at one of your listings, I see that you have no general information about your policies there. You should have a "General Policies" statement, of some sort, a narrative you can type up in a Word document and copy and paste into each listing, as you complete the listing form.

Within your "Policies" narrative, there should be a statement about when you expect payment on your items. My own narrative is divided into sections, including Important Information, which is at the top of the narrative, and which states:

• I ship ONLY to confirmed addresses within the United States. NO INTERNATIONAL SHIPPING.
• Payment is due within two (2) days of purchase, both for “Buy It Now” items and for auction items.
• I accept PayPal ONLY.

By spelling out your payment policy, you'll go a long way toward avoiding problems of this sort.

Since you didn't have your Preferences set to "payment required within 2 days," and you didn't opt in to eBay's automatic Unpaid Item Assistant program, what you should have done with this unpaid sale is to have manually opened an Unpaid Item case with eBay. Then, the regular routine would have kicked in, wherein the buyer would have had 4 days to make the payment. Then, if the buyer had not paid, when that 4 day period expired, you would have manually closed the case, and the item would have been released for re-listing.

As it stands, I don't know where you go from here, but I hope the information I provided, above, will encourage you to get some of your Preferences set so that you can avoid this problem in the future, and I hope you'll consider typing up a Policies narrative, and including it on each of your listings.

Good luck.

[victorjunkman55]

When someone does not pay you, You Don't relist, You open non payment case in the Resolution Center, bottom of this page, This is how you get the fees back you now owe on this "Sale". Go Their now and open your case. Good Luck to you.

When you list as a Buy it now (BIN) Always check the little box "immediate payment required"