So over Non Paying Bidders

[justkidzbiz]

Not selling all that much recently, but OMG, the number of non-payers is ridiculous. At least one or two a week. Now when you only sell a few items each week it’s beyond a joke.

as a seller, if you do the wrong thing (and even when you do the right thing) you get punished, but dead beat non payers get away with it.

what peevs me even more is, I send a polite email asking if they wish to cancel the transaction, there’s no issue but could they let me know out of courtesy. But of course not. Plain rude!  Might start just listing BINs with immediate payment.

[hipgames]

I would definitely go the BIN route

[brerrabbit585]

I hated immediate payment when ebay forced it on me, but now I'm glad they did it. I haven't had any non-payers (of course) and no cancellations either. Eventually the penny dropped and I worked out that capped postage works really well for my items (all letters) and I never have to refund postageor lose fees on excess postage.

[purplemon18]

You can still have non payers with immediate payment, but it's much less common. If you only offer paypal, then it can happen when they have paypal linked to a transaction account rather than a debit/credit card. Or obviously, if you accept other payment types like direct deposit or cash on pick up.

I have all 3 and have not had a non payer for about 4 months. Closer to xmas time it is much more common though.

[jellybirddesigns]

Making all your listings BIN with immediate payment will completely eliminate non-payers.

I promise you will kick yourself for not doing it sooner.

It's one of the best tools a seller can utilise to minimise their stress levels.

[kopenhagen5]

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@jellybirddesigns wrote:

Making all your listings BIN with immediate payment will completely eliminate non-payers.

I promise you will kick yourself for not doing it sooner.

It's one of the best tools a seller can utilise to minimise their stress levels.

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I agree, especially if the auctions usually only get one bid.

For rare one of items, then an auction is probably better.

[rookieyear1984]

Just be aware this happens with best offer too (probably 20% of the time for me) so be ready for some buyers not to pay if you accept their offer. I’ve tried the “auto decline lowers below” option as well as limiting buyers with x amount of unpaid strikes. Doesn’t seem to make too much of a difference. It’s easier (and faster) to just cancel if they don’t respond and relist quickly. 🙂

[clarry100]

Making them immediate payment required will work in eliminating mostly all of the non-payers.

But keep this in mind....

If your items are the type that commonly are bought in multiples then this will mean most buyers will pay for each one separately.

This means if they buy 10, say, then you would have 10 payment transactions. PayPal will slug you the 30-cents "flagfall" fee for each payment transaction. This is 9 extra lots of 30-cents = $2.70 extra fees to PayPal.

Unless your buyers know how to use the cart and put them all in the cart before making the single payment.

But we find most don't use the cart.

So we have not gone immediate payment required for this very reason.

But still the number of non-payers has beome small these days.

[porcelain_dolls_by_me]

Our approach is very simple:

(a) if buyer has not paid by 4 days, open a not paid for the transaction.

(b) if still not paid after another 4 days calim fee refund for the transaction.

(c) add buyer to our 100+ list of black-listed buyers.

[lupercal]

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@porcelain_dolls_by_me wrote:

Our approach is very simple:

(a) if buyer has not paid by 4 days, open a not paid for the transaction.

(b) if still not paid after another 4 days calim fee refund for the transaction.

(c) add buyer to our 100+ list of black-listed buyers.

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This seems like a sensible sort of work-flow for dealing with that problem. 

Honestly it's not something that I get very often. I have no idea why. I know other sellers get it apparently so regularly it's a major pain, but for me it's quite uncommon. I've wondered whether it's the type of items I sell, but I'd say most of my customers seem to be very reasonable. Just yesterday I had someone notify me that I'd sent them a CD with the wrong disc in it - don't know how the heck that happened - but they didn't even want me to replace it - I had to insist. I hope I'm not puting the mockers on myself, but if ebay themselves gave me as few problems as my customers do, I'd rarely have a complaint at all.  

Not triviliasing the isue for those who do get it frequently. If it did happen to me more often it'd certainly be aggravating.