ebay cancelled sales

goodfella66

I've just had 2 cancellations this morning...for items purchased a few days ago. Both were packaged up and ready to go to the post office. 

Are Ebay on some kind of self destruct mission? Promoting/prompting buyers to cancel orders straight after purchase, losing a whole trench of fees by making it free to sell for sellers. As someone who has been in retail all their working life, none of it makes any business sense to me.

kalsha

I've just had my first cancellation.  Bought on Saturday lunch time and cancelled just before midnight yesterday.  I only saw the message this morning.  No thank yous or please - just "cancel my order".   It was already to be posted and I had bought postage online.  I know I can request a refund of the postage paid.
Can we leave feedback for these buyers?  I know a seller can only leave positive feedback but something along the lines of "thank you for paying promptly - shame you had to cancel some 30 hours later..........." or something similar.   Just to warn other sellers?   Any thoughts?

soolin

kalsha said:

I've just had my first cancellation.  Bought on Saturday lunch time and cancelled just before midnight yesterday.  I only saw the message this morning.  No thank yous or please - just "cancel my order".   It was already to be posted and I had bought postage online.  I know I can request a refund of the postage paid.
Can we leave feedback for these buyers?  I know a seller can only leave positive feedback but something along the lines of "thank you for paying promptly - shame you had to cancel some 30 hours later..........." or something similar.   Just to warn other sellers?   Any thoughts?

I really wouldn't, even if you could. My 5, so far, cancellations didn't even contact me at all- just slammed in a cancel request via ebay....

Assuming it's possible, and with a cancelled sale I suspect it isn't , a buyer is likely to turn round and leave a neg to the seller. Also why reward a buyer like that with a positive, most sellers never even glance at a buyer's feedback and we can't stop them bidding anyway without knowing in advance and if it's a BIN with immediate payment by the time we see a poor review it's too late. 

I just hope there is some mechanism on ebay that records these cancellations and perhaps further down the line warns buyers who seem to be abusing the system. I know that buyers have rights, but that doesn't mean that sites like Amazon don't ban buyers who make a habit of having too many cancellations or returns. It would be nice if ebay protected sellers in the same way - or allowed us to have a setting that excluded buyers with more than x amount of cancellation in a short period from buying our things- the same they do with non payers. 

GadgetGuru

Correct me if I'm wrong - a buyer can only cancel BEFORE any payment has been made, correct?
They can't cancel after payment is made?? Or if they can they don't get an automatic refund?

Just thinking of any cancellation request being put through just after the item has been posted!

soolin

GadgetGuru said:

Correct me if I'm wrong - a buyer can only cancel BEFORE any payment has been made, correct?
They can't cancel after payment is made?? Or if they can they don't get an automatic refund?

Just thinking of any cancellation request being put through just after the item has been posted!

They can request cancellation even when payment has been received, most of mine, in fact all I think, were cancelled after payment. 

However, a seller can decline on the basis item has been sent. 

Daz2009

I've been in the other camp, bought an item,paid for it,10 minutes later found it a fair bit cheaper in a high st store,sent a cancel message to the seller,the message was replied to with sorry your item has already been sent, which was clearly a lie .
I had to suck it up

GadgetGuru

Daz2009 said:

I've been in the other camp, bought an item,paid for it,10 minutes later found it a fair bit cheaper in a high st store,sent a cancel message to the seller,the message was replied to with sorry your item has already been sent, which was clearly a lie .
I had to suck it up

On the flip side, I see many buyers who falsely claim the item has a defect in order to return it and not pay for return postage - so the seller suffers both ways, which is very unfair - so probably always best just to accept a cancellation if you can (assuming it hasnt been dispatch of course)

Murphybear

I’m so sorry to hear of this.  I’m sure there are lots of good buyers.  I have bought literally hundreds of items on eBay and have a 100% buyers rating.  

I’ve never thought about cancelling an item or sending anything back.  I’ve only had one problem, I bought a beautiful jacket but when I tried it on it was too small.  The advert said was medium but it was actually small.  I didn’t say anything to the seller.  

I’ve got lots of stuff to sell so I have started looking at this section of MSE to, hopefully, identify any pitfalls before I start.

Rantband

As an Ebay buyer you can only have 100% feedback, sellers are not allowed to issue negative feedback. Lets hope your 100% rating continues when you start selling.

Pollycat

Rantband said:

As an Ebay buyer you can only have 100% feedback, sellers are not allowed to issue negative feedback. Lets hope your 100% rating continues when you start selling.

I've been buying on eBay for 20 years and selling (my own clothes/shoes/bric-a-brac) for about 10 years.

I have 100% feedback from my buyers.
Maybe that is because I take great care to examine my items before I list them, I take lots of photos and my descriptions are very detailed - none of this airy-fairly, meaningless AI.