Dealing With An eBay Customer Who Does Not Pay

admin | Apr 18, 2011 | 0 comments

EBay is a great tool for anyone who wants to get rid of their old, unwanted stuff or wants to make some extra money. But in addition to being great for selling your items, eBay can sometimes be not-so-great for getting paid for the items you “sold.” After all, unlike a regular store – where you are paid first, and then you give the customer the item – you have to wait for a person to pay you after they win the bid; and sometimes, this can leave you waiting for a while!

The first thing you should know, if you are dealing with a customer who has won a bid but has not paid you, is that they have four days to pay. Even though this seems like a while, eBay will not take a complaint unless it has been at least four days from the day when the auction ended. If four full days pass without a payment, however, eBay starts to take it very seriously, doing what they can to help resolve the issue.

The first thing you need to do is contact the buyer directly and see if you can work things out with them if they have not paid you. If they are uncooperative or – perhaps even more frustrating – unresponsive, you then need to take things to the next step, which is filing the complaint with the Resolution Center at eBay.

The buyer will again have four days to pay after you file a complaint with the Resolution Center (and will also, of course, be notified of the complaint). During this time, they are allowed to contact you and ask for an extension or try to make other arrangements, but you do not have to agree. If they do not pay you within four days, and you have not agreed to any other arrangements, it will go down as an unpaid item.

At this point, you can list your item again, or you can provide a Second Chance Offer to anyone else who bid on your item and lost; this also means that the “unpaid item” will go on the buyer’s account. And keep in mind: you can look at people’s accounts when they are bidding, and if you run into a bidder with an “unpaid item” on their account, you can block them to keep this from happening to you!