PayPal claims shown in eBay dispute console

July 10, 2008

eBay.com have just announced that PayPal disputes will now be shown in the dispute console on eBay. It will show the status of open disputes, as well as indicating when you need to take action. If you’re unfortunate enough to have a number of claims open, this should make dealing with them a little easier. The change on the eBay.com site will be made in the next few days.

Written by Sue Bailey · Filed Under Site Changes, eBay.com | Comments Off 

It’s time to stop disputing unpaid items

July 1, 2008

street fight
Creative Commons License photo credit: ernop

A few days ago, Chris wrote about handling unpaid item disputes, and how to get your fees back without getting poor feedback from your NPB. Great advice for sellers, but it shouldn’t have to be like that. eBay has changed, and this should not be about how individual sellers handle the process.

I suspect if we ran the ‘what puts buyers off returning to eBay’ now that bad feedback has gone, UIDs would be somewhere up there in the top five. In my experience, the vast majority of non-paying bidders have what they consider to be a totally legitimate reason for not paying. If we can get rid of negative feedback for buyers because it upsets them, we should do the same for unpaid item disputes. It’s time this process was made much less antagonistic, and much easier and quicker for all involved.

  • Change the name This is the single most effective thing that eBay could do to take the sting out of a UID: stop calling it a ‘dispute’. Change it to ‘potential order cancellation’ or ‘friendly reminder about payment’ or ‘hello, did you change your mind?’ - anything that doesn’t sound like I’m about to sue you for not paying me.
  • Buyers should be able to cancel BINs Buyers in the UK and Europe have, after all, the legal right to cancel an order: I’m rather surprised the OFT isn’t looking at this one. If a buyer BINs an item and then changes their mind, they should be able to cancel the order in a click. The item could then be simply returned to a seller’s unpaid items, the fees refunded, and the item relisted as the seller chose.
  • We need immediate payment required for multiple items eBay is the only website, in fact the only retail outlet I can think of where an item can be sold and yet not paid for. At the moment, the reason that many sellers don’t use immediate payment required is that it’s only good for single items. Giving sellers the ability to require immediate payment for multiple items could - at a stroke - reduce unpaid BIN items to almost nil. And if eBay need an additional incentive, think how this would push sellers even more towards PayPal.
  • eBay should refund all the fees for unpaid items not just the FVFs. Insertion fees and any listing upgrade fees should be refunded to the seller too. eBay have talked about ‘aligning fees with seller success’: this more than any fiddling about with IF/FVF balance would achieve that. Why should sellers take the risk that eBay’s buyers won’t pay? That risk should be eBay’s to take. And if eBay bore the fee loss, then sellers would stop feeling quite so antagonistic towards buyers who didn’t pay.
  • The whole process needs speeding up By the time I’ve figured out my buyer isn’t going to pay and filed a UID and waited to see if they’re going to respond to that UID, nearly a month has gone by with my inventory gathering dust on a shelf and no money in my PayPal account. Something must be done to speed up the process: perhaps a seller option ‘I’m not waiting for this buyer any longer, I’m cancelling this transaction’ which immediately cancelled the whole thing, just like the buyer option above.

eBay’s argument against all of this is likely to be that unscrupulous sellers will use any or all of the above options to get out of paying their eBay fees. But lets face it, fee-avoiders will find ways of avoiding their fees whatever eBay do. I think it’s time that the site stopped being run to stop this tiny minority, and started being run for the benefit of the vast majority of eBay sellers who are honest, and willing to pay their eBay fees so long as they are charged under fair and reasonable terms.

Written by Sue Bailey · Filed Under Featured, Selling Tips | 37 Comments