@i*m-still-here wrote:
Rose, I'm not sure your answer makes sense.
The question was obviously: How do you know you won't eventually get paid if you haven't tried it?
But I think you knew that and chose to side swipe the question.
My answer was clear enough -- eventual payment or not, I really don't care to get paid at a buyer's whim, especially if there is no communication whatsoever. EBay made the UIC process available because there was an issue with non-payers. And I really don't think that giving a buyer 2 reminders and 7 to 8 days to respond before moving on to an UIC is unreasonable, which is my policy.
As I explained, it doesn't work for me from a business perspective to have items in limbo for an indefinite period, unlisted and unseen, when they might be sold to someone else in the meantime.
My guess is that most other sellers would find a very long waiting time for payment unworkable on eBay now, for the same reason -- which has in fact been expressed by others on this thread -- items sitting in never-never land, unlisted, sold but not really sold. There is good reason you almost never see layaway on eBay anymore. Some sellers with larger margins, larger inventories and larger volume can probably afford to be more magnanimous with time, but I'd bet the majority of small to medium-sized sellers who rely on their eBay income can't operate that way.
EBay must agree with this concept, because they are forging ahead with the "listed until paid for" policy. I personally have objections to eBay's use of that measure to enforce immediate payment (I prefer to make my own choice concerning payment time). However, one of the thorns in eBay's side has been the longstanding problem of non-payers, and eBay found this solution to deal with it. EBay likely also needed to streamline the payment process now that they have commercial giants on the site who don't want to be dealing with individual buyers' requests for extended payment times. Why should they bother, with thousands of other buyers waiting in line?
I rarely use "Immediate Payment Required". Yet almost all of my buyers pay immediately for their purchases, with the occasional one taking a day or two. I'm always happy to extend that a few days or even a week or two more upon request, but a month or more - no. I have never actually been asked for such long terms, and would never offer such in my listings. As I said, people have credit cards for those situations.
As far as very long payment terms are concerned, I have no doubt most buyers would eventually pay if given 30+ days to do so, but eBay's policies are not aligned with what is essentially a "layaway" arrangement. Sellers (and buyers) who don't follow the eBay flow chart will have a much more difficult time if something does go wrong.
As a thought experiment, consider this: You accept an arrangement from a buyer for Paypal payment 35 days after a sale (or by cheque, which effectively means up to 45 days until the cheque clears). However, you have 15 watchers, one of whom had decided to purchase the item the next day. So that same item might have been sold, paid for and shipped to another buyer during that timeframe, FB given and received, the transaction closed, and on to the next. Instead, it has disappeared from your store, unavailable.
In the meantime you wait for Buyer #1, who sends a cheque on Day 35. It takes a week to arrive and another to clear. What can you say to a new EBay buyer who perhaps wasn't aware that their ability to make a claim has expired by the time they receive their item, not to mention an ability to leave feedback? The seller gets no FB as a consequence. The seller has no recourse through eBay to deal with a buyer who in fact doesn't pay. What if there are delivery problems but the INR process has expired? What happens to the buyer's Paypal coverage? What if the buyer runs into financial problems and can't afford the purchase after all, so stops payment on the cheque? Both buyer and seller could run into a lot of trouble as a consequence of the lengthy time period. As a matter of fact, a lot of the transactional data starts to drop off the map by that time - how does a seller establish a history on eBay that way? How can this possibly be workable for sellers or buyers on a regular basis?
Other venues may still work for such selling modes, but in my view eBay isn't, not anymore at least. EBay just isn't set up now to handle extended transactions: it wants buyers who pay promptly, sellers who ship promptly, and transactions that are concluded quickly.
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