Pretty sure my customer with 0% feedback and apparently lives at Beverly Hills 90210 is not for real. What now?

[snuffiecat]

In all their emails I can tell they know their way around ebay and are certainly not a new user.

[dmil8030 · Accepted solution]

Hello 'snuffiecat',

Chances are the buyer is not a newbie.  It could be someone starting a second user ID for any number of reasons.  Most sellers have several.  Has the person paid?  You are required to ship to the registered paypal address to maintain your seller protection, - so when the buyer pays, whatever address appears is the one you ship to.  If the buyer has not yet paid, it could be someone wasting your time.

A buyer has 4 days to pay after the end of the auction.  Most sellers send a friendly reminder at the end of day 3 and if still no response, by the end of day 4 (hour 96, if you're counting) they open an Unpaid Item case.  They close the case 4 days after that, get their selling fees back, and relist the item, and the deadbeat gets a strike on his record.  The following link will tell you all about it:

http://pages.ebay.ca/help/sell/unpaid-items.html

If you ship Expedited, you will have a Delivery Confirmation number which will show the item as delivered.  That way, a buyer cannot open a 'Not Received' claim and win, because you would simply enter the DC number into the dispute.  Have a look at this next link to see how the dispute process works, the 45 day deadline, Delivery Confirmation, and all that:

http://pages.ebay.ca/help/buy/item-not-received.html

If the buyer does not pay and you have to go through all that, be sure to add him to your list of blocked bidders here:

http://pages.ebay.ca/help/sell/manage_bidders_ov.html#block

Whilst you're at it, block anyone with Unpaid Item strikes because they tend to be repeat offenders.  Whether you choose months or a year depends on your own sense of leniency:

http://pages.ebay.ca/help/sell/manage_bidders_ov.html#set

Some folks will tell you to block anyone without a paypal account, and if you are getting unpaid items from a lot of zero-feedback newbies it might be a good idea for a time, anyway.  Few sellers do it though because they don't want to miss a sale.  There are a lot of credit cards being wielded by responsible payers.  But some categories seem to be worse than others for the 'prankster' bidders, and yours may be one of them.

Now a brief thought on your listing, -- why in blazes would you shout out in big dark letters what a greenhorn newbie you are?  You're just asking for predators.  Besides, it's 'bear with me' not 'bare with me', - the latter you save for someone special.;-) 

[femmefan1946 · Accepted solution]

http://pages.ebay.ca/services/buyandsell/biddermanagement.html

If this is a bidder, you can cancel the bid and Block the ID.

With a buyer, it is harder.

Do NOT ship to any address but the one on the Paypal account. Use a Delivery Confirmed service like Expedited USA or an insured one like Small Packet Surface USA. Tell the customer that the parcel is insured.

If there is a problem, you are covered by Paypal (Expedited) or Canada Post (Small Packet).

And yeah, never let them know you are not fully knowlegeable and professional.

Keep asking questions.

[ok_so_im_50]

Fake or phantom people cannot register on ebay. Everyone has to verify their ID (unlike years ago when the place was flooded with Nigerian scammers. ID wasn't varied back then).