Epidemic of new account, zero feedback “winners” who never pay or respond to messages

[theclemsonkidcards]

eBay, you have GOT to do something about this. It’s becoming an epidemic on my auctions, and on my friends eBay stores as well. 

We have an auction for a mid to high level sports card (in the $150-$1,000 range). In the last few minutes, an account that was created the same day the auction ends, with zero feedback, wins the auction. The person never pays, never responds to messages; and the auction has to go to a “second chance offer”, or a new listing. 

I don’t know why this keeps happening. Obviously there’s some kind of scam or something going on, I just don’t know what it is. This has happened to me personally at least a dozen times in the last six months. And just today I was chatting with a friend who said it’s happened to him for the third time this month alone. 

1. I don’t want the answer to be “do a fixed price where they have to buy it now”. The point of being on an auction site is to sell the card ON AN AUCTION.  If I want to sell it straight up, at a lower price, I’ll do it somewhere else where I’m not paying a 13.5% premium. 

2. Why is there not a setting to either A) block buyers with zero feedback, or at worst B) block buyers who create an account ten minutes before the auction ends. You can’t tell me that the number of legitimate buyers who create an account ten minutes before an auction ends is greater than the people pulling scams. 

I’m so sick of dealing with deadbeats and scam artists. There has GOT to be a better way eBay. I can’t for the life of me understand why you can’t force people to have a credit card on file that’s charged at auctions end. That solves all the problems, but you refuse to do it. 

Why?!?

[theclemsonkidcards]

I get that too. It a lot of cases it makes sense to set a buy it now. In fact, most of my high end cards are set up that way. But for new releases, or players who are ultra hot at the moment, if you set a buy it now price, it could end up being low and costing you hundreds of dollars. 

There’s no worse feeling than setting a buy it now price, and someone pulls the trigger within an hour of posting. That means it probably could have gone for more. 

And the opposite of that is if you set the buy it now price way too high with a best offer, a lot of buyers won’t even take you seriously and bother making an offer. Which is why the auction format is what works best in that instance 🤷🏼‍♂️

[vintagecraze50]

Look. I am Not GOINg TO BID ON AN ITEM IF I have no intention to pay my bid price. You should not allow people to throw bids into an item with no intention to pay. Of course these same folks can just cancel their order. The THEY get consequences. YOU ARE EITHER GOING TO BUY IT OR NOT it’s that simple.

[vintagecraze50]

Yeah the shenanigans with bidding on a sought after item are there with competitions I would imagine but if these competitors are held accountable for their bid then that would cut down on the nonsense.

[theclemsonkidcards]

Exactly. This is why a CC on file should be mandatory. Like you said, Amazon and a million other places keep your CC info. It’s not like it’s some novel idea that’s dangerous. 

im curious from eBay’s point of view why they don’t just go that route. I’m sure its a bottom line thing, but I can’t imagine that there would be some big pushback from buyers if they made that mandatory. 

[vintagecraze50]

Yeah I get that entirely. You have a great opportunity with these cards on here and it should be easier for you to get the price and make the profit rather than screw around with these deadbeats.

[chapeau-noir]

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@theclemsonkidcards wrote:

I understand why people think it’s a competitor. But I went back and looked, and almost all of the cards I’ve had this happen to were both expensive and rare. Like, one was a 1/1, and the others were 10 copies or less. So the chances of someone having the same card are extremely low. 

it just drives me nuts that I can’t figure out what the scam is. Obviously they’re doing it this way for a reason. But I can’t honestly figure out what it is. If I was selling a card that 30 other people were selling? Ok, that would make sense.  Just trying to drive comps up so theirs would sell for more. But all of mine have been low print runs, and my friend Dan who just had it happen today it was a 1/1 card that no one else could even own. It’s literally the only one that exists. 

I know I shouldn’t let it bother me this much, but not figuring out the scam is driving me up a wall. 

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It's not scamming - scamming is trying to get something for nothing - it's simple tr0lling. Some people just think the stupidest things are funny, or pizzing people off or whatever. There are a lot of adults in this world going on about age 12. Unfortunately, some markets seem to attract them more than others.

One auction seller told me that the reason the CC on file doesn't work is the habit many people have on bidding on several things at once, perhaps over several days, and it makes it difficult to combine auctions so they just leave it up to the seller. Put like that it made sense to me, as the transaction would need to remain open (and I don't think that's possible), particularly since that's a pretty traditional way of bidding on auctions.

[mr_lincoln]

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@vintagecraze50 wrote:

Yeah the shenanigans with bidding on a sought after item are there with competitions I would imagine but if these competitors are held accountable for their bid then that would cut down on the nonsense.

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@vintagecraze50 

Agreed, and up until recently Sellers could turn Auto-pay ON for the Auction flow.  They took that away From Sellers.  It was there and now it is gone ... 

[dbfolks166mt]

     This is a no win situation. Sellers have screamed about this for years and as several others already mentioned eBay attempted to respond to those complaints by implementing the auto-pay feature. The pushback from both sellers and buyers forced them to withdraw that option/capability at least for the moment and there has been no further comment from eBay as to the status of that effort. 

     I use the auction format almost exclusively mostly for time management so BIN is not even a consideration for me unless I am setting up a special bundle for someone. I get a few non-payers but most of those are not from new accounts or 0 feedback buyers the later being less and less relevant these days given the decline in the use of feedback. 

     The thing about non-payers is you never really know why they didn't pay unlike BIN where the buyer may request to cancel the sale for any number of reasons. Unlike BIN you cannot use a guest account on an auction so those bidders may be a one time buyer looking for a particular item, they could also be a sport bidder there is no real way to tell. If they are an established buyer any number of things could have happened after they placed their initial bid. The could have died or wound up in the hospital, had a family emergency, been hit by a natural disaster................ 

     Despite all the pushback with regards to the pilot of the auto-pay on virtually every auction site I participate in/on you are required to have an established account and a payment method on file before you are allowed to bid on any item. If it had always been that way on eBay there would be no issue but people are resistant to change for the most part. 

     Since I do not use BIN I am not sure how long the IPR capability has been available but I would assume there was/is some pushback to that functionality as well. So here we are stuck in limbo with no solution is sight that is going to make everyone happy. 

[dbfolks166mt]

What would be better, list as a fixed price with immediate payment required and get paid or keep doing auctions and take a chance of not getting paid.?

Myself, I'd rather get paid, even if I didn't get the most for an item.

     The flip side to that is you do FP with IPR, get paid and get a cancelation request 10 minutes later or a return request after the buyer receives the item. I get a few non-payers but almost never have a return request for any reason which I much prefer since I don't have to potentially pay the return shipping. A non-payer on an auction cost me $.30 and some time. 

[chapeau-noir]

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@dbfolks166mt wrote:

What would be better, list as a fixed price with immediate payment required and get paid or keep doing auctions and take a chance of not getting paid.?

Myself, I'd rather get paid, even if I didn't get the most for an item.

     The flip side to that is you do FP with IPR, get paid and get a cancelation request 10 minutes later or a return request after the buyer receives the item. I get a few non-payers but almost never have a return request for any reason which I much prefer since I don't have to potentially pay the return shipping. A non-payer on an auction cost me $.30 and some time. 

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I'm confused - why would someone have returns on FP/IPR and not on auctions? The return rules are the same for both.

[1syndicate]

You call it pilot testing and some call it targeting accounts...E-bay I losing members everyday

[dbfolks166mt]

@dbfolks166mt wrote:

What would be better, list as a fixed price with immediate payment required and get paid or keep doing auctions and take a chance of not getting paid.?

Myself, I'd rather get paid, even if I didn't get the most for an item.

     The flip side to that is you do FP with IPR, get paid and get a cancelation request 10 minutes later or a return request after the buyer receives the item. I get a few non-payers but almost never have a return request for any reason which I much prefer since I don't have to potentially pay the return shipping. A non-payer on an auction cost me $.30 and some time. 

I'm confused - why would someone have returns on FP/IPR and not on auctions? The return rules are the same for both.

     With an auction the bidder may not have paid simply because they changed their mind or found it elsewhere for a cheaper price....... over the course of the auction. The BIN/IPR buyer may have changed their mind, found it cheaper elsewhere........ but that did not happen until after the item was shipped. There have been several postings on this forum describing this happening to sellers. 

[chapeau-noir]

OK - though I think that's basing a lot on speculation. I used to do a lot of auctions and found no difference in returns.

[dbfolks166mt]

OK - though I think that's basing a lot on speculation. I used to do a lot of auctions and found no difference in returns.

     Of course a lot of it is based on speculation since eBay will never actually release that information for obvious reasons. There is a LOT of speculation on this forum. 😀 While I have never used BIN I cannot personally compare the two listing formats but I have seen some of the postings on this forum regarding returns so about the best I can do is generalize those along with the non-payers. 

[rugerskick]

Ebay really does need to allow sellers to block sales to a zero fb account/same day created account.  Only a very small percentage of sellers will ever select this anyways, and those would be the sellers who have a history of negative experiences with these types of sellers.  So many apologists here are fine and never have problems with zero fb buyers, so these types of buyers will be able to buy from them.  A very small fraction of sellers who would use this will in no way prevent zero fb buyers from buying here while allowing them more freedom to avoid problems they've had in the past, ebay wouldn't permit them to avoid.  The apologists will be very happy anyways as those sellers who opt to use this will remove themselves from the running, leaving more zero-fb buyers to buy from them.