An item sells, the description is wrong. I go ahead and cancel order, or wait for buyer permission?

[glowinni0]

An item sells, upon final inspection of the item I find the description is wrong. Do you all wait for the buyer to give persmission, or do you just immediately cancel the order? Sometimes it takes the buyer a day or so before they answer my emails and it's frustrating

[femmefan1946]

I immediately Messaged the buyer, explained the problem and, as I recall, sent a scan of the problematic item.

We agreed to cancel.
You have a few days for the buyer to respond, no hurry. The possible harm to your shipping time is much much less important than a Defect for Not As Described and all the hassle and expense of a Claim and return.

[m60driver]

Canceling the sale without a buyer request is the last option.  I would inform the buyer of the newly found discrepancy and ask the buyer if they would like to cancel the sale.  If the buyer agrees to cancel the sale you are off the hook and can cancel the sale because buyer requested to cancel.  If the buyer does not respond then, depending on your cost of the item, you can either ship and hope for the best or cancel unilaterally and get a ding on your "metrics".  But this is just another good reason to have at least a 3-day shipping time so that a buyer has more time to respond to these situations. I just had this exact scenario and was was able to get the buyer to request a cancelation.  I actually gave the buyer a choice of canceling or shipping and giving a partial refund.

[onefootflipper]

When I encounter this problem I usually send the buyer a message like this.

Hi, when I was going to pack up your item I noticed this problem, would you prefer (Insert solution or ask if they still want it) or would you rather cancel the order. Oftentimes the buyer doesn't even care about what I thought was an order killing issue and they still want the item.

That way you either still get the sale or get a buyer requested cancel. 

I use the exact same thing on the rare out of stock situation in trading cards as well offering any replacement card in my store up to an arbitrarily selected higher price point than what they paid for.  When you have 16,000 different trading cards it is inevitable that from time to time one of them will end up misfiled and not where it is supposed to be when it sells.