Lack of FVF Offers?!

soolin

tightauldgit said:

soolin said:

tightauldgit said:

soolin said:

subjecttocontract said:

I've found sales generally have been down for the past year or more. I've had to lower prices more than I would like just to attract any interest, I've attributed it to the increases in the cost of living. EBay sales seem to be the most affected, at least for me, with Gumtree proving to be the best for sales. Ebay fees take around 14% and their apparent favouring of buyers over sellers is particularly annoying.

I've recently listed an item on EBay that was buy it now, collect only. We had a buyer buy, pay for and then change his mind and ask us to post it. We refused, he lived locally and could easily collect. But no, he raised a dispute and EBay clawed the money back and refunded him. I did nothing wrong but then was charged an additional fee by EBay for investigating and refunding the buyer. That leaves a bad smell. 

There should not have been any dispute fee at all if you had refunded on the basis that buyer changed their mind. You would have got your FVFs back and buyer would have been prevented from leaving feedback.

Why should a buyer be able to change their mind like that though? If it's from a private seller and you buy a collection only item then you collect it - don't ask to post it after the fact. How Ebay could have found against the seller in that case (assuming the story is true) baffles me

If buyer didn't have their item then ebay were never going to tell the seller to keep both the item and the money! If buyer paid and won't collect I don't believe it is correct to just keep the money, private seller or not, if buyer hadn't paid then there was always the possibility of going for a NPB. 

But what dispute has buyer raised? Item not received? YOU DIDN'T COLLECT IT! So I don't see how the seller should take any hit for that

Fair enough you can file a NPB which does exactly the square root of zero to the buyer and doesn't gain you anything except avoiding further punishment from Ebay. 

And then we just get back to the same discussion about Ebay simply allowing people to change their minds after placing bids in supposedly binding auctions again. 

I was merely pointing out that the OP in this instance has ended up with fees to pay and probably a seller penalty on their dashboard when realistically it was easier to just cancel the sale easily and without penalty on either side. A buyer would almost certainly win an INR case as there was no proof that buyer either had it delivered or picked it up.

Ebay is online, it is a simple bot run system, if a seller could win an INR for a collection only item wouldn't that mean that no one ever bought a collection only item again? All scam sellers would have to do is say 'they won't collect' and even if that seller was giving the wrong address, or not answering their door or even trying to palm buyer off with a box of newspaper at point of collection seller would still win. Yes it seems unfair but the alternative is that ebay employ several hundred (thousand?) adjudicators to go through the evidence on both sides to decide if buyer was able to collect at a suitable time and that the item on inspection was correct. People don't like the ebay fees already (and basically that was what this thread was originally about) , I can't imagine they are going to want to pay an extra percentage for real humans to intervene and judge cases. Realistically if seller cannot prove buyer collected (and that's what the QR code is for) then buyer should win an INR as it is the safest way of trying to protect both parties.  Both parties are elft in the original situation, yes seller has lost a sale but that's all, they still have the item which can be resold.

Just a word of warning, if sellers don't like people who don't collect then I would certainly avoid other sites like FB marketplace and Gumtree where it is much more common.

tightauldgit

My point is not that the seller should be able to keep the item and the money it's that if a buyer messages you to say that they changed their mind about collecting it and now want you to post it then there shouldn't be repercussions for the seller and should be repercussions for the buyer. 

There are some absolute endpieces on eBay. Take my experience today. I listed an item on Sunday taking advantage of the 80 % FVF offer. Today I get an offer on it of half what I listed it for. Fair enough I just want it gone so I accept. Then literally within a minute I get a cancellation request from the buyer who was obviously either too stupid to know how eBay works or too ignorant to care. 

So now I not only lost the sale but I also lose the FVF offer and either relist it at full fees or have to wait two weeks to list it again. There's no way to simply reinstate the listing as it was. 

So I lose. Repercussions for the buyer .... Zero. And I can't even easily work out how to block the absolute trouser press of a buyer. 

I don't have much sympathy for how difficult it is for eBay when they have basically established themselves as a monopoly and suck in tens of billions of dollars in revenue every year. It didn't used to be this bad I'm sure ... But then maybe the average IQ of the eBay users is dropping. 

Between this and FB buyers I've kind of lost the will to live with it all this week. 

olgadapolga

tightauldgit said:

And I can't even easily work out how to block the absolute trouser press of a buyer. 

Try this link (you'll need to copy the username):

https://www.ebay.co.uk/bmgt/BuyerBlock

tightauldgit

olgadapolga said:

tightauldgit said:

And I can't even easily work out how to block the absolute trouser press of a buyer. 

Try this link (you'll need to copy the username):

https://www.ebay.co.uk/bmgt/BuyerBlock

thanks, ebay dont make it easy at times.... annnnddddd breathe