Immediate Payment required

[diabill]

I had a customer that was forced to pay for an item he purchased from me on a flat price listing even thought he had won a pin the day before on an auction and was waiting for auctions to end on other items he had bid on.

I do not have immediate payment required on any of my listings. Evidently EBAY has now rolled Immediate payment required out without bothering to notify sellers.

I went and checked under help and this is what EBAY says about immediate payment required

Immediate payment is automatically required on items priced below $1000, that have a specified shipping cost, and where PayPal is the only payment method offered.

I don't sell enough to sign up with a credit card company and EBAY does not allow mail payments to be offered so I can not offer another payment plan except for PAYPAL.

I offer a flat price for shipping so it seems I am stuck with immediate payment required.

But I have a thought if I go to calculated shipping and handling does that mean that EBAY will not require Immediate payment. I sell Hot Air balloon pins and have customers all over the USA and the world that are always buying multiple pins over a period of several days.

What do you think????

[castlemagicmemories]

I'm not sure but I had an experience with two fixed price, immediate pay listings  from a seller, who stated in the listing, ask for an invoice for combined shipping.

She did not put the immediate pay on there, and I could not request an invoice because of this.  She could not remove the immediate pay.

She made an offer to me on each of the items from a message I had sent, I accepted, then she could send and invoice.

IIRC, those listings had calculated shipping.  IF true, the answer is no, it won't help you.

[diabill]

Thanks 

I was afraid it might not work which is why I asked before I went ahead and changed over 1500 listings.

If a buyer over pays the shipping and handling from not being able to wait for an invoice from me then I of course refund the excess through PAYPAL. 

Ebay chages fees on the shipping and handling cost and does not refund it when you do a refund of it.

It's not much but if you have to do it several times it can add up. Then think how many sellers are out there and you can see that it amounts to a lot of money in EBAY's pockets. Gee wonder if that is why they changed it???

I wish they would make Immediate Payment Required like it always was. Let the seller decide how he wants to do it.

[mam98031]

I do not have immediate payment required on any of my listings. Evidently EBAY has now rolled Immediate payment required out without bothering to notify sellers.

They have announced it and sent out a few emails on the subject.  Apparently you missed them.  They are phasing it in.  

I don't like it anymore than you do.  I hate that Ebay is making this manditory when for years it was a choice.

[div_style]

The only way around this is to have buyers "add to cart" until they are done buying.

If you have combined shipping rules set up, they will be used to get the proper shipping amount.

Disadvantage for buyers is that while items are in the cart and not paid, someone else could buy them.

[lookng2015]

Not to mention that the cart option won't always work as it should anyway.

[dcintennessee]

Similar situations have occurred for me. HOWEVER, I found that if you click on the notifications bell at the top of your screen, it will show the number of items awaiting shipping. Click on that notification. That will bring up a page showing all unshipped items. It's a page where you can batch your shipping labels. I'm pretty sure this is somehow a marriage of eBay, Pitney Bowes & the USPS, and you'll only be able to use this page if you're shipping all packages USPS. I could be wrong about that, but it seems that I've tried to use other carriers and couldn't. This page also offers the option to print a batch shipping page (there may be a more official title), that you can take to your local Post Office. There, the counter clerk can scan only the bar codes on that page & check in all of your items at once. With eBay, if there's another way to get this batch page - which is very handy and easier to access with other popular ecommerce sites - I haven't found it.

Now - once you're on that page, and assuming your buyer has the same shipping address on both orders, there will be a prompt at the top of the page that you have two (or however many) orders eligible to be combined. Click on them to combine the orders in to one shipment. This will enable you to (legally) ship in one box, and will automatically provide the same tracking number for the combined orders.

What this process won't do is a rate correction for your buyer. YOUR extra expense from IPR or the buyer otherwise not managing to get all items in the cart, is that you've paid Paypal 30 cents for each transaction, plus fees to both Paypal & eBay for the entire $ amount collected for shipping fees. If you issue a partial refund to the buyer, Paypal will immediately refund the percentage of what they've collected, but not the 30 cents for the extra transaction. eBay will refund nothing. It sounds like your items are lightweight, so I don't know what the savings will be from shipping them together. I sell mostly heavier items, and it can be several dollars. Last time it generated savings of about $17.

This is what I do next. After the shipments are combined to one label, I finish prepping the package & purchase the label. Then I calculate the overage the buyer paid, plus the fees I incurred because of 2 transactions & overpaid shipping. I refund they buyer their overpayment, less my extra expenses. In a situation like this, where the overage was neither your fault nor the buyer's, I'd probably divide the extra fees in half. Eat half of the overage & add the other half to the buyers' overpayment that you're refunding. That's simply my sense of fair play.

What I would NOT do is explain the math to the buyer. They're getting a good-will gesture of a refund. There is no reason to muck up the works with prolonged explanations of how, or even why, the refund is calculated. I'd send the buyer a message something like:       Dear buyer name, Thank you for your purchases. I was able to combine them into one shipment, and it's headed your way today via USPS...whatever.  Combining the shipments means that I was able to refund $x.xx of the shipping fees you paid. This amount has been credited to your Paypal account.  Sincerely, Seller name

We can't correct the eBay craziness that we & our buyers sometimes have to deal with, but often we can find a workaround that's satisfactory and won't get us in trouble with eBay. Good luck!

[myboardid]

I've been using IPR on my listings for years and I love it!  No more chasing non-payers!  You can adjust the shipping costs for your buyers after they have finished purchasing by sending them a refund, taking into account the eBay fees on ship charges.  If it interferes with your ship time, you can call eBay and they will take off any penalties for not shipping within your handling time.  Yes, it is different from what you are used to, and change is hard, but you really don't have a choice. 

[lookng2015]

I don't mind the seller checked off IPR, it's the eBay FORCED IPR I object strongly to.

[mam98031]

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@lookng2015 wrote:
I don't mind the seller checked off IPR, it's the eBay FORCED IPR I object strongly to.

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ABSOLUTELY !!!!

That is my major complaint too.  

For me I use IPR on ALL my fragrance listings and I have since I started selling them years ago.  But all my craft stuff does NOT have IPR.  I'm fortunate right now as the forced IPR has not hit my accounts yet.  I don't know why, but I'm certainly not complaining about that.

IPR is a killer of many buyers purchasing multiple items.  There are many buyers out there that do not want to mess with the Shopping Cart or have had too many problems with the Shopping Cart and don't want to use it.  For these buyers they are use to purchasing what they want, do a little more shopping and buy some other listings.  When they are done, they let me know and I send an invoice with combined shipping.  That works extremely well for me and always has.

Ebay's rationale for doing this is LAME.  They say it is to help stop non paying buyers.  I can and have assured Ebay that if this was the answer to that problem without creating a different set of problems I would have done it years ago.  This manditory IPR thing is insulting to sellers as Ebay is also telling us that after all these years we just couldn't figure this out on our own and needed Ebay to force it down our throats.  I say, get over yourself, you [Ebay] are not the authority on what my custmers want.  Nor is Ebay my partner in which they should be able to make decision like this for me.

[diabill]

Thanks you to all that have taken the time to respond. 

I sell Hot Air Balloon pins. They are very small and don't weigh much.

Many of my customers buy multiple items per week from my auctions and from Flat Price listings.

They are used to being able to buy and pay once per week. Auctions no problem but when they buy

a flat price listed pin, They have to pay immediately. So they then send the payment.

If I don't mail it within the 24 hours and instead hold it to send with the pins they win from my auctions it can cost me my Top Seller Rating. Plus as discussed before when I refund the excess shipping and handling it costs me money.

EBAY once stated that they require Immediate Payment because it helps new sellers.

What they could have done if that is the reason then make Immediate payment the default but allow sellers to disable it if they choose.

When will someone in EBAY work with the sellers and do something to benefit on the sellers

Unfortunately if we sell on EBAY we have to follow there rules, but we don't have to agreee with them.

[lookng2015]

Call me cynical but it seems VERY convenient (for eBay's bottom line) that the only ID of mine to have been hit with forced IPR is the ID which often sells multiples.

[dcintennessee]

Hi - I hope you got a chuckle out of my detailed response, posted when I got up before the roosters this morning. I responded as if you were a baby child seller who needed help with a workaround. I sure laughed at myself just now when I looked at your profile & store!! So many people here use different posting/buying/selling ids that I rarely bother to look at profiles any more. I miss the early days of eBay when people bought stuff they wanted, you figured out how much shipping would be, and made payment arrangements. Paypal was in its infancy, so I often got checks - never a bad one - got cash a few times, and heard of sellers who accepted S&H Green Stamps... The culture shock from having been away from eBay for 15+ years makes me feel like Rumpelstiltskin. Minus the beard.

[d-k_treasures]

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@lookng2015 wrote:
Call me cynical but it seems VERY convenient (for eBay's bottom line) that the only ID of mine to have been hit with forced IPR is the ID which often sells multiples.

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Shocking, isn't it .... ?

[mam98031]

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@lookng2015 wrote:
Call me cynical but it seems VERY convenient (for eBay's bottom line) that the only ID of mine to have been hit with forced IPR is the ID which often sells multiples.

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I can see how you would feel that way, but I really don't think so.  Like I said they have not forced IPR onto my listings yet and that is a very good thing.  

They are phasing it in just like they started with their first attempt a couple years ago.  A couple years ago they stopped after some period of time because sellers were yelling and screaming and doing whatever they could to let Ebay know to stop it.  I'm uncertain as to why they thought this was a good thing to bring back with as much uproar as there was the first time they tried this.

I a hopeful that sellers and buyer will continue to voice their complaints to Ebay.  It is most likely the only way we can get them to stop.