Ebay just shared a big update, starting May 13th, buyers in the US who win an auction will not be allowed to cancel. US buyers will no longer be able to submit a cancellation request after winning an auction. Here is the full announcement:
Finally
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Surely they just won’t pay?
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now to tackle shill bidding and seller cancelling when item sells for under market
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You have to enter a credit card before placing the bid, so unless you bid higher than your credit limit, the charge should be forced through
A lot of auctions or OBO listings require you to have a payment method on file when submitting a bid/offer. Not sure about PC but this seems to be the case on the eBay app.
Buyers could still request cancellation within the 1 hour window before payment auto processed so this change should reduce cancellations further.
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Easy fix: seller only gets 3 chances to cancel because “lost or damaged.” After that, a cancelation results in forfeiting ebay selling fees. Would drastically reduce cancelations for low auction sales
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There are ways around this. A common way is to load a low-value eBay gift card as your payment method, you can bid on whatever you want and the payment won’t go through.
This is a great step in the right direction for eBay, but I don’t think it’ll make a big difference as to unpaid auction sales.
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The effect of the policy change really depends on the breakdown of who are the non paying bidders. Is it the flakey people “oh I just had to get stitches and can no longer afford this” or are they people bidding just to mess with the seller or manipulate auction results.
I’d be so curious how many non paying bids are people bidding on $100 cards. This should resolve a lot of those sales
Did know this was a thing until you mentioned it. What if eBay required the amount on the gift card to be put on the payment information and then didn’t allow bids higher than the gift card amount?
Ah, I said that because on UK and when I buy from US it takes me to a checkout after I win an auction. Only making an offer (US still takes me to a checkout if accepted) and buy now is instant payment. They should make that rule here as it’s 4 days then they get a strike.
Wouldnt this mean it would need to be updated for every transaction no matter how small?
I disagree. Even a small push has a massive effect. Even if you “can” somehow still not pay, many people who would normally just flake out will be deterred from doing so and end up paying. It’s the same reason why Google pays Apple $20B to be the default search engine even though people “can change their default search engine if they want to”
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Oh yeah you’re right. Or what if payments from a gift card were a different section all together? Then it would work like a credit on the account rather than a payment?
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This is almost perfect. They should not allow the seller to cancel a winning bid “if the buyer asks”. Shill bidders are still an issue. And as it stands now at least, I’ve had sellers mad that their items didn’t sell high enough and cancel my bid effectively by saying I asked to cancel. This is a lie. The seller wanted to cancel, and its weird they can just do that with 0 communication.
Anyhow, this will help things. I think a lot of the time I end up over paying because some people are just whack and think that they can over bid, then turn around and get cold feet, or bid on 3 things and just cancel if they win more than 1 of the items based on which one they win for the least amount or whatever the case.
The real reason they are doing this is that ebay is getting rekt on charge backs. I wouldn’t be surprised if visa and other credit card companies contacted them over this saying its causing them headaches and losing them money.
Needless to say, some responsibility in this has been needed. I hope they do more.
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yeah I’ve not been sure why and how some listings are different that way.
I also realized that they might need to make bundling auction wins easier if they do this. I have to sometimes do the request invoice thing to combine. I have had issues where sellers try to scam on high shipping costs. So I don’t know if there is a way to remediate that issue with this change.
Great change, now they should just do something similar for EU too
Good to hear. I’m not a seller but I’ve always thought it was odd that buyers could simply not pay (on eBay or any auction platform).
Does anyone know how they plan to enforce the policy? Ideally they’d have a mechanism in place to force payment and/or step in and make the seller whole if that mechanism fails.
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pokeshillers in shambles rn
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if they shill with this in place, u can just force the item thru auth and they cant do shit 