@immortalfigures wrote:
Here is a fun one. Just finished a series of auctions for some vintage transformers. Auctions performed really well and they all went for the high end of what I expected. Fantastic. When I went to send invoices I saw that most of the items were purchased by one person.
You don't need to send an invoice unless you're putting together a combined shipping charge, as eBay sends plenty of notifications to the winner that it's time to pay. Sending an invoice will lock in the Shipping charge to the buyer's eBay address (i.e. not any other address to which he might want to ship at a higher cost), and reset the 96-hour payment deadline before you can cancel with the reason of Buyer Did Not Pay.
@immortalfigures wrote:
While I would normally wait until the couple days passes before I can terminate for non payment, I really don't want to tie these items up for long (I have travel plans that will restrict me from starting the auctions again for a while if I wait for the whole period).
It's four days, not a couple of days, before you can terminate for non-payment, counting from either the end of the latest auction or the time you sent the latest invoice, whichever came later. Also keep in mind that even if you jumped the gun, cancelled early and took the hit for that, your next go-around might end in another slow-pay anyway. Don't schedule your listings to conflict with your real-world schedule.
@immortalfigures wrote:
Also, as a side question. Any ideas why someone would do this?
In a collectibles field, it may be someone who's bidding on multiple examples of some item, planning to pay for whichever one he wins for the lowest price, and abandoning all the others. For example, the winner of your latest sale ("Transformers Crosshairs w/ Pinpointer 1987 Vintage G1 Targetmaster") in just the past 30 days has sprayed 141 bids across 135 auctions, plus 2 bid retractions. (To see this statistic, log out of your selling account, click on the number of bids in the listing to bring up the Bid History page, and then click on the disguised ID of that bidder. This will bring up the 30-day summary of his bidding activity.)
You will help both yourself and others by waiting the full 96 hours before cancelling, so that the Buyer Did Not Pay reason will appear in the list of choices for cancelling (you will not see that reason if cancelling before the buyer's payment window has properly expired), and then the deadbeat will get an Unpaid slap on his record. Two of those and he will find himself getting restricted from future auctions by sellers who have the most restrictive filter set up (here) to block deadbeats.
