Followup to last night's post about first-time ebay seller (me)

[PeterB]

I just noticed that one of my buyers (possibly not coincidentally, the only one not to pay me yet) has his feedback hidden/private. Why would someone do this? (He's got 99.3% positive, with two negs out of 408 in the past 12 months, but neither of the two negs is in the last 6 months.)

If I specified that payment was due within 24 hours of auction, and someone (this guy) doesn't do it, the next step is what, exactly? Send them another email reminding them to pay? (I already went ahead and sent the invoices last night to the people who hadn't yet paid, as people here had suggested.)

[papercup]

I would email, but I find ebay buyers don't read. I'm not sure they can.

I personally barrage buyers with invoices, first gently, then firmly.

You are in a waiting game. A neg will do you no good, so you wait, and email.

Maybe he got called out of town, or wrapped his Harley around a pole on the way to the bank.

The only way around this in the future is immediate payment by Paypal.

Good luck (as always with eBay)

[PeterB]

papercup, how is "immediate payment by Paypal" different from "within 24 hours" ? (The reason I specified 24 hours is that "immediate" is open to interpretation, whereas "24 hours" is not...)

Oh, and another question -- I notice that Paypal is charging me fees; I presume these are because I upgraded to a "Premier" account and can now accept payments made by CC's. Would I have been better off not upgrading?

[papercup]

Paypal always charges me fees, I am unsure of the premium features.

Read about immediate payment here:

http://pages.ebay.com/ImmediatePayment-faq.html


edit: I guess I have premium verified account.

[JJ]

Paypal does not always charge fees. I send money to friends and family from my personal account all the time without a fee.

In my opinion, you probably have no need for a premium or business Paypal account unless you plan to sell a lot of stuff on eBay.

The main reason that a premium account is a bad thing is that once you "upgrade" EVERY transaction results in fees. Send your Mom $50 and a fee is deducted! With a personal account you can send money without paying fees.

Once you have "upgraded", they make it difficult to revert. Unless you expect to be selling a lot on eBay, I think you should consider downgrading. This is where it gets a little hairy...

If you downgrade, you can only do it once. After that, if you ever upgrade again, you are stuck with the upgraded service and the fees to go along with it.

My 2 pence.

[Markintosh]

Yeah for me - I upgrade to premier so you can accept the credit cards..it's the path of least resistance for most of us.

Yes, that means i can no longer send money to everyone without incurring a fee. If i want to send money to Mom, I can always send her a check and she knows it is good.
. Mom can send me money on her credit card...just send her a PayPal invoice.

[wurm]

Yeah, the "once you upgrade you pay fees on all transactions" thing really bites. I went so far as to open a second Paypal account and made that my Premiere account just for the several auctions I was going to run for which I wanted to be able to offer credit card payments.

I still have my personal Paypal account if someone wants to pay me for something by direct transfer. But I learned the hard way that I can't stipulate that fact in a listing. If you offer Paypal, there can be no ifs, ands or buts. I had an auction pulled because I asked that if they want to use Paypal, to contact me first and I would let them know which account to use.

eBay/Paypal don't play that.

[swampy]

I might have wanted your item, but I would not have bid on it after reading a demand of "payment must be made within 24 hours". Depending on what time your bid closed, I probably would not have met the "demand".

Scenario. Bid closed at 10 PM EST, Bank opens at 9 AM then next morning. Mail goes out a 5:00 PM. (I'm way out in the boondocks and we only get one mail truck in/out of town a day). If you live in California and my mail has to travel 100 miles to get to the regional mail distribution center (true also for Fed Ex or other overnight service) which is yet another 50 miles from the nearest airport that handles overnight shipments, my cashier's check or money order will never make it.

I deal with this all the time. I'm in Florida, my son in California. A standard 37 cent letter takes four to five days to get to him.

I don't do Pay Pal since they ripped me off for $200 in a deal gone bad on eBay. I paid for stuff that never arrived. The seller had no receipts or tracking information on the goods they claimed they shipped. This was before eBay bought out PayPal, but I got no satisfaction, lost my money, closed my PP account.

[rexrzer]

To reiterate, if you stipulate PayPal in an auction, you have to accept credit cards and the fees that go along with those transactions. You can't write into your auction, for example, that you only accept direct bank account transactions via PayPal, no credit cards...your auction will be pulled in a NY Second if eBay gets wind of that.

PayPal is not a free service, by any measure, if you want to buy and sell on eBay with success. You can look at it like it's a necessary evil, or you can use it to your advantage. Personally, I've only had one bad transaction via PayPal out of more than 800 auctions--and even then, it was successfully resolved in about 45 days in my favor.

I like PayPal. It gets me buyers who would otherwise not participate in my auctions; it's convenient, quick, secure, and easy to use. PayPal does a service and they get compensated for it. That's fair to me, as as seller and buyer.

________________

[PeterB]

Thanks everyone for info.

The reason I went for the 'Premier' upgrade was because I thought I might get in trouble with buyers if they tried to pay me via Paypal and used a credit card for it, then I wouldn't have been able to accept the payment (that's happened to me before with non-ebay stuff, so I've always specified 'no Paypal paid for with credit cards'-- I'm pretty sure you can't do that for ebay). In other words, because I decided I was going to try selling on ebay, I decided to start accepting cc's... I didn't see that I had much choice there, because most people seem to want to pay that way...