Why do seemingly well rated winning bidders not pay and don't communicate?

[shaocaholica]

Ever since I started selling again 6mo ago I've had some strange non payment orders.

1)$800 final value item, 300 feedback buyer, no replies and never paid

2)$250 final value item, 100 feedback buyer, no replies and never paid

2)$200 final value item, 200 feedback buyer, actually replied to me but only once. 'Okay' was the whole message.  Still didn't pay.

If these seeming high feedback buyers had remorse they could have simply asked me to cancel instead of making me wait in silence.  Are they ashamed?  I don't get it these aren't 0 feedback trolls.  Why ghost the sale?

[wastingtime101]

Are your questions rhetorical or do you want some real answers?

• Sport bidders with no intention to pay.
• Competitors that want to take your item off the market and/or raise the auction price before they list their own item.
• People that bid on multiples of the same, then only pay for the one they won at the lowest price.
• People that realized they couldn't afford their bid.
• People that don't realize the consequences of abandoning an auction they won.
• People waiting for pay day, then had other bills come up and are too rude to request a cancellation.
• People that changed their mind or even forgot.
• People that don't care.

The list goes on, but I'll cut it off there.

Bottom line: it's a part of using auction format on this site and it's a problem. eBay is working to address it but it's taking a really long time. They said they plan to get auto-pay on offers correct before they move on to auto-pay for auctions.

I don't think you'll see anything change this year. Next year? Maybe. Too soon to tell. I think it'll be at least a couple years before we see auto-pay on auctions based on how slowly they're rolling out auto-pay on offers.

[soh.maryl]

Since buyers can only be given positive feedback, aren't all of them "well-rated"? They cannot be rated anything else.  

And I assume you are routinely cancelling, citing "buyer did not pay" as the reason.

Are you aware that you can set your buyer requirements so that buyers who have two nonpayment strikes in twelve months cannot buy from you?

Another suggestion would be:  give up auctions, list fixed price, immediate payment required.  

[shaocaholica]

I didn’t quite mean ‘well’ rated but has a high ‘number’ of ratings vs a zero or low feedback buyer who could be a fake or troll account.

thanks I’ll look for that setting.

[soh.maryl]

Not sure why you believe that zero or low feedback buyers are more likely to be a "fake or troll account".  How much feedback did you have when you started here?

[shaocaholica]

If feedback score is discriminatory why have it at all?

For all my items bid over $1000 I politely ask zero feedback bidders to send me a simple message. It weeds out 99.9% of them.  Clearly a huge number of them bidding on expensive items are not serious enough to reply to a message.