Hello,
I'm looking for some advice on a buyer I'm dealing with. If this were a small order I wouldn't even bother with this, but this order is $200 and I'm not sure what to do.
I have sold a couple items to a buyer after accepting their offers. I received a question about an item's condition before they submitted payment and responded promptly. The buyer then said that they were close to my area and thought about doing a pickup, but couldn't for another week. I explained that this would end up in eBay auto-cancelling the order after four days due to lack of payment, or my seller account getting a penalty for a late shipment. I notified them to select the Local Pickup option if it was available to them, but they paid for shipping anyway before telling me they couldn't select local pickup.
Here's what I normally do. I would write back to the buyer and tell them that I will cancel and refund their order so we can attempt to do this again with a corrected listing, I've done it plenty of times without serious issues. Now for the strange part, the buyer tells me that I should ship him an empty package to his address so that eBay will mark the order as shipped and to leave him positive feedback.
My issue with this is that the buyer has stated that they would like to pickup their items, yet has paid shipping and instructed me to do something that likely goes against eBay's policies, and goes against how I like to do business. So the buyer is okay with getting an empty box while I have their money and wait for them to show up for pickup (if they even show!). I've never had requests like this since I started selling on eBay and I'm getting a bad vibe from this whole situation. If I followed their suggestion they'd be getting two extra feedback points without the terms of the order being finalized. The buyer was also gracious enough to tell me that I could use one tracking number for two orders (gee I haven't thought about that before after 2 years of selling), as well as to not pack the items as they want to inspect them. That just makes me think that they will back out of the purchase easily and make this whole process a waste of time.
The last correspondence I had with the buyer was to explain how I wanted to cancel and refund the order and correct the local pickup option.
Does anyone have any decent advice for me? Anything that I can clarify from my post? Should I just tell the buyer that I won't do local pickup and just ship the packages as that is what they have paid for?
Thank you.
