New Item Not Received Process

VH

I noticed on EBay announcements today that there is soon to be an 'Item Not Received' process for buyers.

This will allow a buyer to file a dispute against a seller if the item is not received within 10 days of auction end. I feel that this is a mixture of good and bad news:

Good news -

Gives the buyer more protection and provides a smoother way of communicating with the seller if things go wrong. Long overdue.

Bad news -

10 days seems a very short amount of time given that a lot of buyers can take a week to pay anyway. The system is a little short-sighted as it fails to take this into account.

Even if the buyer pays by cheque immediately, then there's slim chance of the cheque being received, being paid into the bank, clearing, then item being sent and received within 10 days. If you ask me, this is a partial attempt to get rid of slower payment methods and get everyone using Paypal.

And what about sending things abroad which generally takes longer? Doh!

Fuzzy_2

That's too short a time frame, especially to allow cheques to arrive, get banked and cleared. As you say VH, a back door way to get more sellers to use PayPal, thus more profits for ebay. I can see many sellers losing their +ve feedback as a result.

A good idea in some respects, but they need to extend the time, I had a look at the announcement, and it doesn't say whether it's 10 working days or not, that might help somewhat if it was.

soolin

I also agree that this seems like a back door way of pushing paypal.

It will be interesting to see how this works in principle, most of my auctions are paid by paypal which is fine as ebay have a record of the payment date. However cheque payment rarely reach me within a week and since my post arrives mid afternoon the earliest I can possibly bank a cheque is the day after receipt.

ALso as you rightly say 10 days will be almost an impossibility for goods going overseas. It seems that even if we limit our auctions to Uk only buyers non UK buyers can still bid, I had one today (see my recent post).

The only good thing about it is that it will stop some sellers holding onto sold goods for ages. On a couple of occasions I have bought something paid immediately by paypal and then waited over two weeks for it to arrive. There was even one seller recently that I noticed had a big disclaimer in their auction terms saying that they only post out twice a month and any negative feedback left for slow delivery will be returned.

One other point that occurs to me is that it will have an effect on sellers that sell advance tickets for events. I have never been tempted to bid on ticket auctions for events months in advance as I don't like the idea of paying in advance and not seeing my goods, but it does seem a thriving business.

Soo