Selling to a nonexistent buyer with 0 feedback?

[mark520fay353]

On my seller account, I had a quick sale that went through; I required the buyer to pay upfront with the "buy it now" feature.

I made a message as follows (Names/location) will be blurred out to fit Ebays ToS):
"Hello, fr*****
Since you are a buyer with 0 feedbacks, we would like to check up before continuing.
What is your reason for purchasing?
Will you be using this item yourself?
Your answers will be manually reviewed.
Thanks for your cooperation."
He replied that he's buying for his son's 14th birthday.

Using the information provided by Paypal, I looked up the buyer name and addresses; according to that info, there is only one S***** W***** that exists in California at the age of 22, which is far from his address in Georgia.
I looked up the county he lives in according to his address, in the county property appraiser (public records), it shows that a senior home owns the property. The county tax collectors site finds no record of the person either.

Would a 22 years old live in a senior home and want to buy his 14-year-old son an expensive birthday gift?

Will you continue withe the sale?

[adam_quyet]

I think you shouldn't be too worried

[mr_lincoln]

@mark520fay353   (0) Feedback Buyers are the future of eBay ... they are new ... they need to have a positive experience to keep coming back to the site.  We sell to several each month and know that OUR transaction and our Feedback left for them will be their very first ...

If a Buyer pays we ship to the address on file ... after that we deal with any issues if they arise.

If you don't want to sell to (0) Buyers then you may want to consider selling elsewhere ...

[annadryl]

To be really honest, I'd be much more comfortable in dealing with a buyer who has no feedback (so has also left none) than to expect possible, well, someone's I'm looking at...

[dinpavent0]

absolutely!! Imagine going to walmart or amazon's websites and trying to buy for first time and they start questioning why you are buying, who you buying for, where you live, whats your age, etc... you get the picture. I would say the H...E....LL with that!! And I would immediate cancel and want a refund and never go back there again. Yes there are scammers out there but on both sides, sellers and buyers can be scammers.. It is just insane to me to question someone with zero feedback any type of questions like that.
Honestly, when I first starting selling on here I looked at other listings to get an idea of what a listing should look like. I seen a lot of "if you have less than 10 feedback contact me before bidding or your bid will be cancelled"... So on my early listings I put that at the end thinking it was a normal thing to do until I became a little more seasoned and realized how ridiculous that is! I changed my templates and tried to get it off most of my listings. It may still be on some old ones, but just haven't had time to go thru one by one to remove it. I had ppl ignore and just bid or buy, since I don't do auctions hardly ever and I have had ppl actually contact me to say hey I am real, I have less than 10 fb is it ok to buy, your listing says to contact you. You know how bad I feel about that?
Well you learn as you go, so point is, this is something that you DO NOT WANT TO DO is give a buyer a questionaire after they paid in full immediate payment. I honestly get so many buyers that have zero fb or have less than 10, its crazy. Most find me on google search for an auto part so they have guest account or open a new account or just don't buy often. I NEVER give them a hard time.

Im sorry for long response, I am in shock about all the questions.. I would be mad and want my money back and buy else where. It is ok to be a little careful on higher priced items but careful and paranoid two different things completely!

[dinpavent0]

I required the buyer to pay upfront with the "buy it now" feature.

If the buyer paid you, clearly he is not "nonexistent".



I made a message as follows

If I received that wildly inappropriate message from a seller, after I got my item I would probably neg him.

NO I would cancel and want my money back and buy elsewhere. No way man. Forget the the neg, I straight up would cancel my order.

[tdumonde2014]

You have 4 feedback as a seller and you're grilling buyers. Hmmm

[autopiacarcare]

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@gwens*4saleitems* wrote:

Correct me if I'm wrong but ….

Guest checkouts appear to be "new" buyers with 0 feedback.

Yes!?!? (do you see that I'm confused?)

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@gwens*4saleitems*  - You are not wrong.  Guest checkouts appear as a "new" account created on the day of checkout with 0 feedback.

We've had an on going repeat scammer who uses different guest accounts every time to try to get around our blocked bidder list.  I won't go into the whole story here, but there is a very long thread about that situation if you look at my posting history.

Guest checkout can be used to hide past history and/or circumvent block lists and savvy fraudsters know this.  It's a loophole that I wish eBay would take more seriously and do something about.  At the very least, I wish they did a better job of differentiating between truly new 0 feedback buyers and guest accounts so that sellers know what they are dealing with and can assess their risks better.

That's not to say that what the OP here is dealing with is necessarily a scam situation or that the way it was handled was appropriate, but I can definitely empathize with their concerns.