Sometimes the juxtaposition between how eBay sees itself in the marketplace and how it expects its sellers to operate, and buyers’ behaviour is so vastly different. eBay wants to take its place alongside big retailers in the on-line marketplace but yet, in some ways, there’s very little progression since the time eBay began – from the buyers point of view.
Of course, eBay is unique in that it includes auctions on their site, which I believe should be a thing of the past. I use them because in my selling category, my 50 + 50 free listings do not include fixed price. And I pay for a certain number of fixed price listings. To use the auction with buy it now is not feasible any longer, with the 30% variance required. With fixed price, you can stipulate immediate payment – no problem. It leaves the buyer no room to negotiate shipping charges or the price itself after the fact, and if he attempts to, we can refund and claim the buyer changed his/her mind. With auctions, after the purchase, the buyer can try to negotiate all sorts of terms and you’re not sure after your response to them, whether or not they’re still interested, so you wait and eventually file the unpaid item claim which takes your product off the market for 8 days.
What facilitated this post is the buyer who after winning the auction last night, said, I’ll pay you next payday (10 days from now) – not “is it okay if I pay you next week?” A lot of sellers probably don’t think this is a big deal but, quite often, the 10 days goes by and there’s no payment, requiring more communication and often a delayed UID. I know that I can respond that this isn’t acceptable and cancel the transaction ….. and I probably would if it was a big-ticket item. In this case, the $25.00 is not a hardship but I think about items that sell for, say, $100+, with more than one bid. The winning bidder delays payment and may not pay in the end, whereas the second highest bidder would have paid, the item would have shipped and the seller would have the money in his/her pocket. It’s not hard for me to keep track of unpaid items, because on each of my selling accounts, I only have about 100 to 150 items for sale at any given time, but how about the sellers who have thousands.
I believe it was Pierre who said that he used to even accept Canadian Tire money from buyers in the early days. Well, in many respects, that mindset of buyers has not changed much. If eBay insists on keeping auction listings, then for efficiency purposes, buyers should be required to pay within 24 hours of an auction end and, if they don’t, the transaction is automatically cancelled. Surely, with all sorts of mobile devices now, they can check to see if they’re the winner. Sellers who have a long-standing, constant customer base are likely listing fixed-price only, so this wouldn't be an issue for them.
If eBay wants an efficient operation, doing away with auctions would go a long way to achieve this goal.
