DISHONEST BYERS

[whistlersmother1]

As sellers we get some information about buyers but not enough. i would like to know how many items they did not receive an  item and asked for  a refund for and how many times they asked for refunds for unsatisfactory goods.

i had a chinese buyer who had bought thousands of items. he had perfect feedback. he would never get his item, ask for a refund within a very short period of time, and he would ask for a refund for an item directly through Paypal and not go through ebay direct. i have a few friends who sell the same things as me and they had dealt with him and blocked him.  why can't we report these people in a meaningful way?

whistlersmother1

[femmefan1946]

@teenytrinkets 

I think those FB would pass muster.

However I hope you send them AFTER you have the item (or at least something) back from the buyer.

The Dispute process can be helpful, since sellers don't usually have many, and scammers don't want to get on eBay's radar by opening many Disputes.

Reports and feedback are not the way to stop scammers. Refusing to fall for their scams and making them work for their sketchey refunds are.

Use tracking if the item is valuable enough. (Even if that value is emotional.)

No refunds without returns. Preferably damaged items with original wrapping showing postal apology for the damage.  (Also useful if you plan an insurance claim.)

Pay the return shipping. If the buyer "doesn't like it/is disappointed" someone else will.

The whole point is to make the scammer customer work for the refund. Often this makes the problem suddenly disappear.

EBay probably could do more to protect sellers. Keeping a diary of Disputes would be a start, since apparently they do that for sellers.

But our main protection is the same Dispute process that scammer threaten us with. 

[teenytrinkets]

Oh OF COURSE I leave this follow up feedback after the formal dispute process is complete. I don't make it easy for them!!! In my experience, making it more difficult hasn't stopped them.

My point here is to WARN OTHER SELLERS because Ebay does NOTHING! I report them, they sympathize and they may or may not investigate, and then nothing happens. It's super frustrating when the scamming is soooo obvious!!!

[femmefan1946]

Here's the thing, as a warning to other sellers, feedback is useless.

Over 85% of transactions are Fixed Price, the seller doesn't meet the customer until he buys.

Of the few remaining Auctions, most have a Buy It Now option, and seller doesn't meet the customer until he buys.

Of the Auctions that actually sell as Auctions, most either get only one bid at the last second, or have a last minute snipe bid and the seller doesn't meet the customer until he buys.

No time to read feedback, until the transaction is underway.

Personally, I think FB should be dropped in favour of a successful transaction count, for both buyers and sellers, with no opinions included. YMMV.

[pjcdn2005]

In most cases a seller isn’t going to check a buyers feedback until the sale has been made so the follow up really doesn’t help other sellers imo.  The only time I may read a buyers feedback is if they make an offer, otherwise I don’t usually bother to look.

I do think that buyers are more likely to look at a sellers feedback then vice versa.  Comments such as ‘sorry you didn’t get your item, I have sent a refund’ or some of the other examples that you gave in a previous post are more likely to tell dishonest  buyers that you are an easy mark rather than give other sellers a heads up. 

[hlmacdon]

Ebay doesn't care about buyer fraud as they monetize it. Whatever internal thresholds are there are set to useless levels. My niche has identified several scammers that have a multi-year history of scamming on ebay with multiple linked accounts. They are all still active. Have documented and reported buyers that have admitted to credit card fraud in their ebay messages and their accounts are still active. If a payment processing partner identifies an account as fraudulent ebay should coordinate to take the buying account down. But hey that might hurt that number of active buyers metric right? 

As long as ebay fails to deliver on their user growth numbers and top line revenue this isn't going to change. Retail fraud drives their revenue. If you ship tracked the buyer fraud just switches to counterfeit or empty box claims. It's time ebay started behaving like every other ecommerce retailer. Start doing some actual risk assessments on transactions and set a proper threshold to detect buyers with a history of suspected fraud claims. If the claims don't correlate with the sellers performance it is easy to detect them as the actual incident rate beyond defective claims is miniscule in ecommerce.

Monetizing fraud is the lowest possible tactic to inflate revenue, but hey whatever works I guess. It's disgusting when you read through social media and forums and see just how many sellers are getting ripped off every day and you realize these are often the sellers ebay targets all their advertising campaigns at. Scummy as can be. 

I like how Taobao handled this issue in the Chinese market in previous years. As an emerging market they had large fraud problems on the buy and sell side. At one point every buyer and sellers defect metrics were publicly visible. Sellers could opt to decline a transaction if the buyer had an excessive claim rate. They later scrubbed that but I though it was a novel way of handling things.

[femmefan1946]

TaoBao may have had the advantage of operating in a country with little Rule of Law and erratic enforcement  of what laws there are.

And of course, being in a country that had moved from a mercantile to a communist/centralist economy and is only now becoming a consumer economy.

The public defects policy may be related to the "social credit" (not Real Caouette's version) system being experimented with more recently.

[teenytrinkets]

It's not useless for me, since over 75% of my sales are best offer. I've declined offers and blocked buyers when I've seen informative followup feedback.

My point is that I do everything I can as a seller to warn other sellers about scammy buyers. I encourage other sellers to do the same.

[whistlersmother1]

ver.