I’ve been trying to sell my iPod Touch on eBay for the past few weeks. eBay have charged me £39.14 for their services so far. Which is interesting, because they’ve failed to match me with a buyer scrupulous enough to actually, well, err… pay.
Case 1 decided almost two days after the auction had ended that she had actually been looking for a 2nd generation iPod touch. My advert clearly stated I was selling a 1st generation model. Obviously by this time it was a bit late for second chance offers, so I re-listed…
Case 2 decided that despite the fact that my only payment method was described as PayPal, he would try to pay by a number of other methods, but would categorically not pay by PayPal. This seemed suspicious – as far as I am aware there is no real cost as a buyer to paying by PayPal. So after he declined to pay in any safe manner, I re-listed again…
Case 3 kindly bid a slightly preposterous £205. Market value on eBay for iPod touches is around £120-140. This chap had already closed his account by the time I logged on to check the account status. I can only assume that this bid was an attempt to take my listing out of the running so he could get more bidders onto a similar item he was listing.
eBay’s response to my queries has been quite interesting.
Despite the fact that I had a message from the user in the first two cases categorically saying they were not going to buy the product, I had to wait 5 working days before I could even open a dispute. If I actually want the buyer to get a strike against their account I would have had to wait a further 8 days, with no refund from eBay. The only way to resolve the issue sooner was to say that we had reached a mutual agreement, which of course we had really not.
“I know you have encountered this circumstance where the buyer for your item has already informed you that they will no longer continue with the transaction. However, since the resolution process is controlled by eBay’s system, we will be unable to override it. Furthermore, the resolution process is also built to prevent members from manipulating the process.” – eBay
Please understand that he resolution process was made to resolve
> transaction issues in an impartial way. I know you have encountered
this
> circumstance where the buyer for your item has already informed you
that
> they will no longer continue with the transaction. However, since the
> resolution process is controlled by eBay’s system, we will be unable
to
> override it. Furthermore, the resolution process is also built to
> prevent members from manipulating the process.
I was not sure how this prevented members manipulating the process, but it was making it pretty hard for me to warn others that this buyer had messed me around. Surely it’s better to err on the side of caution, flag the user as having cause a bit of trouble first and then resolve any issues later?
When I suggested that eBay might not be taking seller protection very seriously, (at this point only two of the sales had fallen through) they kept falling back to:
“I assure you that we take buyer non-performance very seriously”…”eBay only provides a market place for buyers and sellers to interact just as a local authority might provide a physical venue for a market to take place” – eBay
The important difference is that if I am physically selling something in a market and the buyer does not pay, I just offer it to the next buyer. In eBay’s case they just charge me another few pounds to start the whole saga all over again.
I was particularly interested by the statement
…”we do not authenticate users”… – eBay
While I had understood this to be true, the rating and dispute system gives a very misleading impression that users are somehow regulated. The users in my case have all now got away with no damage to their ratings, but at a cost to me. It is so difficult and time consuming to get strikes against users accounts that I don’t believe most sellers would bother.
The problem is that while winning an item on eBay is technically a legally binding contract between the buyer and the seller, it is almost meaningless because eBay have virtually no power to enforce the contract and the amounts of money we are talking about are too small to involve courts. What is needed is a way to transfer the cost of not completing the transaction from the buyer onto the seller.
It would be nice to see users have to prepay at least enough to cover the listing costs of the seller if they choose not to complete the transaction, since eBay will not refund this. It would place an onus on the bidders to take the process more seriously and be a trivial cost for anyone serious about buying something. This would unquestionably improve the efficiency of eBay as a market in my mind. I somewhat cynically think that eBay will not be interested in this though – after all their interests are currently aligned to the seller re-listing as many times as is possible.
An interesting note on the last buyer is that they appear to have done the same thing several times already – they were user xxxxxx0011 and user accounts xxxxxx0001- xxxxxx0010 had similarly been discarded over the last couple of days. All accounts shared the same user details. xxxxxx0012 was still active, so they were presumably striking again. This is clearly something they can do something about – anyone opening a series of account over a short period of time is clearly suspicious. This sort of spam activity should be monitored as a matter of course? I’ve just reported this to eBay tonight and I’ll be interested to see what their response is.
Watch this space.
