Cancelling a bid after auction to non-winning buyer?

bluedog

An item I had on auction ended last night with a total of 2 bidders, but most unfortunately in this instance, I wasn't around at the time to see this unfold.

Bidder 1 put their bid on 20 minutes before it ended for just the amount it started at. Then, with minutes to go, they emailed me to ask me to cancel the bid as they'd put it on the wrong item.

With about 10 seconds to go, the second bidder put theirs in and went on to win the auction for 50p more and paid immediately.

I'm not sure which is the best way to go about this now, as I think it would be unfair to the winning bidder to just leave it as it is. (I know it's only 50p more, but its the point in principal and I would be a bit miffed it it was me if the shoe was on the other foot.)

However, I've never had to cancel a bid before, let alone after an auction and to a non-winning bidder and am not sure how to go about it. I feel I should respond to the first bidder too anyway (and then block them...) to at least acknowledge their email.

My thoughts are to cancel the first bid and then refund the second bidder the 50p but am not sure how this will effect the final price for the second bidder, especially as they've already paid. Obviously, I'll email both to explain what's going on or gone on.


I want to keep within Ebay rules & regs too so I'll really appreciate some help and advice please as I can't find anything that helps in this situation.

hermum

I'm not sure if you can cancel a bid after the auction end.
If you really feel that the winner should pay 50p less then I would just refund 50p through paypal.
How could the first bidder have put in the wrong bid, if they only bid the start price?

MissGivings_2

It was the winning bidder's choice to pay what they wanted for the item, the winning buyer doesn't know the underbidder wanted to cancel, unless you told them, so let sleeping dogs lie.

No need to bother cancelling now.

Or go to PayPal and refund 50p if you really want to.

bris

If there is only 2 bidders and the under bidder wants to cancel then, if you want to do the right thing, the start price is the winning bid and re invoice for this amount or refund the difference using the refund option within the paypal transaction.

bluedog

Doing a straightforward refund was the other course of action I'd though of doing, so thanks everyone for your input.