Barry Collins is fed up with eBay’s lax attitude to non-payment for goods
“Buyer beware” is a phrase often bandied about in the anodyne advice offered to eBay shoppers, but in my experience it's more often the sellers who get a raw deal from the site. Twice in the past month I've tried to sell an old PlayStation Portable (PSP) console on eBay, and twice the winning bidder has failed to cough up. What does eBay do to deter these time wasters? Diddly squat.
The site's regulations say buyers should settle a payment within 48 hours of winning an auction. Being the relaxed kind of fella that I am (ahem), I waited four days before sending my first reluctant buyer a polite reminder that he owed me £36.50 for my console. I received a reply that was as short on logic as it was punctuation: “Bidded in error please cancel bid thank you”.
It really isn’t possible to bid “in error” on eBay. You enter your bid, press a button and are then asked if you’re really sure you want to do it. It's not like sneezing at Sotheby’s and accidentally buying a Monet. And even if you did get a bit trigger happy, you can apply to retract the bid, which the King of Grammar most certainly did not.
Fuelled by righteous indignation, I went to leave my hit-and run bidder some particularly snarky feedback to warn off fellow sellers, but it turned out I couldn’t. The only options are to leave positive feedback or report the buyer, via what eBay calls an “unpaid item case”. This basically gives the buyer another four days to pay up. If they don’t, eBay “may” decide to refund the seller’s fees and “may” record the unpaid item on the buyer’s account.
Eventually, eBay closed the case, refunded my fees and told me an “unpaid item has been recorded on the buyer’s account”. Yet, when I looked at the user’s profile some three weeks later, it displayed “100% positive feedback”, with 110 positive reviews and not a single negative. To all appearances, the guy is Mother Teresa and Gandhi rolled into one.
I relisted the item, and this time it went for £47 - £11 more than the original winning bid. But it might as well have sold for £47,000, because it went to another non-payer with a perfect eBay history, who ignored all reminders to pay. So I’m left with an unsold PSP, another four days waiting for eBay to resolve the case, and an email from the site to “keep your account in good standing” and pay the fees I apparently owe them for an item that didn’t sell.
Why is eBay portraying these phantom bidders as model buyers? Why isn’t it doing more to keep them off its site? I don’t know, because eBay declined to comment on this article. The only thing you can do is delve deep into the settings and refuse bids from anyone who has a history of nonpayment. But since eBay doesn’t make that information public, I’ve no idea if it works or not. In the meantime, if anyone wants a mint condition PSP with six games, get in touch: £40 ono. No time wasters.