non paying bidders rant

[welshdan]

Has anyone else seen a massive increase in non paying bidders?

The number is rocketing here with me.

I send them the invoice, a polite message then open a non payment dispute which is usually ignored.

I get my final value credits back from ebay in this instance, and 'a mark' is put against the non paying account. However this must be costing eb hell of a lot in missed fees? I feel that they really should be cracking down on this as its disrupting the whole market place

[Nyco]

LOL your best option is to do Buy It Now Listings and click "advanced listing tool" at the top right of the listing page. in the listing page where your paypal email is select the button right under it saying "immediate payment required" this will kill the problem.. unless you prefer running auctions your going to have to watch for ⊗⊗⊗⊗ bidders block them & cancel the bids.. but for some reason this happens in all categories. I dont know why it could be because of
-new bidders not know how to use ebay/paypal
-change of mind or seen another item to bid on and abandon your listing
-competition playing around
-scammers
it could be anything. lol but your best bet is to do buy it now listings

[Haidukken]

Nothing has changed, you'll always get non paying people- Nothing new there.

You can always change settings and try to avoid them, but I wouldn't bother. If you change settings and some people get filtered out because of it, you might lose potential customers.

If you have a person that doesn't pay, you can always relist the item right away and/or sell it to other bidders.

Annoying? Yes, sometime it can be.
Problematic? No, not really.

[Play]

I only deal with BIN + Instant Payments.

But there is an option for auctions where non payment cases are automatically opened, and your fees are refunded etc. - you may want to opt in for that to make life a little easier.

Auctions were always just a bit too messy for my business. Never used them.

[MM78]

I do have some items that I do Bids but 90% of my stuff...is BIN. I don't have time for idiots.

[Haidukken]

I remember when I started out, I used auctions because I didn't have any experience in the stock that I was trying to sell so it was a safe way to find out what I could make and also to make sure I shift my stock(I was investing £100-200 a week into stock, MAX).

Now few years later I hardly ever run auctions. Too much stock to keep track all the auctions and payments and shipments as a one man team.
Its better for me to list all my stock now for BIN+instant payment and just get on with things. I've not noticed much difference in terms of the total amount I earn and over a month it seems to even itself out- Some days I sell more, some days I sell less but numbers wise its very similar to auction way to selling.

I only run auctions now when I'm trying to clear some stock that hasn't moved for more than 3 months and I need space- I then drop the price by 50% and just get rid of it.
BUT, even now I do that less and less because I've expanded my operations and I have a luxury of keeping hold of the items for longer- They'll sell sooner or later.

just my two cents out of fifty.

[glacier922]

Best solution, have tons of listings, tons of accounts, and have automatic unpaid item assistant do the work for you. Never look at non payers again, and just keep printing out those labels.

[Bunneh]

you only get success fess back when your clase closes, you dont get the listing fee back.

[colie72]

Ok....some decent feedback above..and some not so good.

Auctions are great....ALWAYS keep auctions on the go!! when some idiot doesn't pay you...and even if they do...use the 'second chance offer' to sell to the nearest 2-5 top bidders (if the offer is reasonable) people hate being pipped at the post and if you are will to take a slightly reduced price (any profit is better than no profit) then you can sell 5 items off the back of one auction.

C72