An Ebay Beginner Needs Some Advice About A Non-Payer.

I buy a lot of stamps on ebay. I also occasionally try to sell some, and occasionally I succeed. I sell, buyer pays, and I write him a letter and send him the stamp. I posted a stamp for auction, a very average-looking 26, old, but hardly rare, and to my surprise it was bid up to ten bucks. But now it is over a week and no sign of payment. What should I do?

Don

Most buyers seem to pay on the day of the sale or very shortly afterwards. A week's delay isn't excessive, but s/he should by now have had a reminder from ebay itself. My recourse is usually an invoice with a polite "grateful for payment" message. But too soon to be really worried!

Also - have you checked that the buyer's in the US? I occasionally wonder why someone hasn't paid, only to receive a request for an invoice from someone in Chicago.

We wait 14 days and then open an "Unpaid Item Case". Probably 90% of the time this prods the buyer to pay, if they don't we wait the required time, close the case and relist the item. We've probably filed over 500 Unpaid Claims and I have only received 1 complaint.

Lately my issue has been buyers that simply refuse to give me feedback. I have sold six items in the past month FB left on just one. I know they got the items, tracking shows it. I refuse to go chasing it but it's sort of strange.

Have you left those buyers feedback? I won't leave feedback for a seller unless he/she has already left feedback for me.

Your listing look fine to me, polite, reasonable shipping etc. I agree don't chase feedback it's annoying. Do you give automatic feedback on payment, bidders like that. Just give it time and feedback will accumulate. I think I get feedback on about 25% of my sales but I really don't pay attention to it.

I do not use the feedback system although I will rarely make exception if a seller goes the extra mile and then requests me for it. Otherwise, I simply send the seller a message which allows me to actually provide detailed feedback instead of a 'tweet'. I see no reason to support their corrupt and badly broken feedback system.
Don

Don I agree with you but as a Seller the bidders REALLY want their feedback so I set it on automatic 5 years ago and haven't worried about it since. A few times I wished I could have taken back the feedback but it's not worth worrying about.

Getting back to the original post, I filed an Unpaid Claim against an older gentlemen a couple years ago and he went crazy.
"How dare you file an Unpaid Claim against me? Don't you check feedback before you file and unpaid action, I'm 72 and I have over 700 feedback with no negatives."

I didn't bother pointing out that this was meaningless to me he could have stiffed 50 people and it would never show up in ebay's feedback system.