Why do some buyers never pay?

[mpssupershop]

Since I've started selling around this time of year I've noticed I've had to deal with a frustrating amount of occasions where I make a sale, and then the buyer just ghosts me, never actually paying for the item and never responding to my attempts to reach out to them until eventually I'm forced to cancel the order. I don't know why some of these people purchase something that they clearly had no intention of actually paying for, but as a seller it is extremely annoying.

[iamalwaysright]

Don't manually cancel the order. Let ebay do it automatically after 4 days and the buyer will get a penalty strike. Doing it any other way let's these buyers off the hook to do that again over and over.

[maxine*j]

I suppose there are a number of reasons for non-payment, from the thoughtless to the trollish. 

Sell at Fixed Price, Immediate Payment Required, dump "Best Offer," and the whole issue disappears, though.

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[tobaccocardyahoo]

Buyer's remorse has many causes.

Often the buyer looks at what they bought, slaps their head and says "What was I thinking".

At other times, they discover that if they had just looked at a few more items for sale, they would have found a better price.

Sometimes, their life partner slaps them across the head and says "What were you thinking"/

[mpssupershop]

If that's the case then why don't they just cancel the order so that I can relist it for someone who actually does want it to find? Why just leave the item in that state of limbo until eventually Ebay autocancels the order and penalizes them?

[tinsoldierunderground]

There are also the sport bidders, those who like to run up the price for fun... These cretins never plan on winning, but they sometimes do by accident.

[soh.maryl]

When/if the seller manually cancels after 4 days, citing "buyer did not pay" as the reason, the buyer  DOES get a strike, so did not understand your response.  

Have never heard of eBay doing it "automatically" after four days.  What if, for instance, I, the seller, would like to give the buyer a few more days to pay, especially if the buyer has sent a message begging me to give them a day or two longer?  

[chapeau-noir]

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@mpssupershop wrote:

If that's the case then why don't they just cancel the order so that I can relist it for someone who actually does want it to find? Why just leave the item in that state of limbo until eventually Ebay autocancels the order and penalizes them?

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This subject has been talked about over and over down through the last 20 years. The bottom line is that the only remedy is to do what most sites do - set up for immediate payment required, which is the old fashioned way of doing things, and skip the auctions and the rest of it.

Until eBay has a bundling features for buy it now/immediate payment so that people can combine purchases easily and say make an offer, or allows the item to be available for purchase until the individual offering for it actually pays, it's not going to change.

[mpssupershop]

I have dealt with this situation before and most of the time, the day they say they'll be able to pay will come and go and still no payment, and if they do still respond they always seems to have some kind of excuse why they need a few more days. My advice is in these situations to put your foot down and cancel the order if they haven't paid by the time Ebay will let you cancel the order for non-payment because honestly if they can't pay for it, they shouldn't have placed the order in the first place. 

[iamalwaysright]

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@soh.maryl wrote:

When/if the seller manually cancels after 4 days, citing "buyer did not pay" as the reason, the buyer  DOES get a strike, so did not understand your response.  

Have never heard of eBay doing it "automatically" after four days.  What if, for instance, I, the seller, would like to give the buyer a few more days to pay, especially if the buyer has sent a message begging me to give them a day or two longer?  

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I haven't done auctions in a while and always have IPR on my listings. I remember when UPI's went away ebay was cancelling auction purchases for me automatically by default after 4 days. I was able to change this in settings. Is that not the case anymore?

[inhawaii]

Why do some buyers never pay?

Human nature.

It's been going on since the beginning of auctions.

[iamalwaysright]

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@mpssupershop wrote:

If that's the case then why don't they just cancel the order so that I can relist it for someone who actually does want it to find? Why just leave the item in that state of limbo until eventually Ebay autocancels the order and penalizes them?

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Because nowadays people like to always think they are too busy for many things like these. And frankly they don't care.

[dbfolks166mt]

     I have responded to posts like this so many times I am surprised I don't have a canned answer already typed out but I will after this. 

     First you should be aware that due to the constant seller complaints about non-paying bidders or offerors eBay is in the process of implementing an auto-pay process for best offers and auctions that should virtually eliminate non-payers. However there are tradeoffs. I will post how to set that up in another response. 

     As others have stated there have been and probably always will be sport bidders or competitors that run up your auction price so their items look better. However, unlike a BIN item where you know that the buyer is sitting at the computer or on the APP offers or bids can be placed and then the buyer goes off and does something else. Several things can happen in that time span. First worldwide about 150,000 people die every day, multiple times that many wind up in the hospital with medical emergencies or as a result of an accident. People are hit by natural disasters: hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, blizzards, earthquakes......... People have family emergencies that require their focus and attention. Over the years I have had non-payers who were impacted or involved in one of the above. I always reach out to the buyer/bidder to find out why they didn't pay. I have gotten responses back from several who had legit reasons, some apologized and asked if I still had the item and actually followed up with purchasing and paying for it the second time around. Probably the worse case was a family member that contacted me to let me know that the person who had placed the bid had passed away of a major heart attack. 

     While I still get an occasional non-payer I still use the auction format almost exclusively mostly for time management. It has worked well for me over the years. 

[mtgraves7984]

Here's the link to automating the NP cancellation. >> Preferences for items awaiting payment (ebay.com)

Regarding the scenario you speak of, here's eBay's tip: You can exclude certain buyers from having orders canceled automatically when you enable Preferences for items awaiting payment on your selling account.

[dbfolks166mt]

     My follow up regarding the autopay feature. I am not sure if it has been fully deployed but if you enable the following in your account settings it will require the offeror or bidder to provide payment information before they make an offer or a bid. When the auction ends or you accept the offer the payment is automatic similar to BIN/IPR. Be aware that enabling these comes with some trade offs which you can find in multiple posts on this forum.

     To activate from your account settings go to selling preferences and click on it. 

Scroll down to Your buyers and managing who can buy from you and click on the edit

Scroll down until you see the following two boxes, check them and hit submit.