Buyer protection? Sellers will be leaving in droves!

[plumowl49]

Totally unacceptable to expect sellers to send goods without payment.  What about seller protection, or don’t we matter?  Scammers will be rubbing their hands in anticipation and there seems to be absolutely no eBay plan as to dealing with the ‘didn’t arrive so not paying’ aspect of this badly thought out proposal.  

I, for one will be complaining - to a real person and not a useless chat bot, and I urge others to do the same (just type ‘I need to speak to a human being’ seems to work).

[plumowl49]

Apologies about my post - my mistake as I misinterpreted the eBay email, relevant section below.  I had initially thought that goods would have to be both despatched and received by the buyer before any payment was required.  In my defence it could have been worded more clearly!

•	Seller paid after delivery: When buying from private sellers, funds will only be sent once their item has been delivered.

[*vyolla*]

That could've been interesting seeing eBay try to get payments from buyers who already had their items. 😀

[vintique*violet]

An experience I had when the " free to sell" came in was that a few potential buyers contacted me and asked me to accept very low offers or to reduce my pre-loved items because " you don't have any fees to pay"...  I was at that time selling an item which had only been used a few times and in immaculate condition and had been sitting in the drawer for months. Brand new £60, other sellers £45, my price £24.99 free postage... I was offered a tenner?! 

So, possibly  many buyers will either not buy at all ( like me now) or they will contact the seller to ask for a reduction so to offset the " buyers protection fee"... 

[*vyolla*]

The fee is certainly a psychological barrier to purchasing. I was just on Vinted and saw something that I fancied, noted the extra buyer protection fee and just wasn't as interested. Weirdly, if I saw the same item on eBay right now on a Buy It Now listing at a price that was the Vinted item price + buyer protection price inclusive I'd probably just would've bought it without a second thought. It's seeing that extra fee.

[grumpyoldposter]

Having sat down and thought about this topic it seems to me to be a dumb idea..

Having first thought this was maybe a good idea to sort out the sellers who claim to be private but are in fact business sellers and even the playing field a bit seemed good however..

If you sell an item on ebay then the buyer has protection ie if it does not show delivery buyer is covered if it is not as described or whatever other excuses buyer wants to make up they are covered by MBG.

So if ebay hold the money or not make zero difference as if transaction goes wrong buyer is covered and ebay will recover funds from seller either way fact!

So what is the point of holding back the funds as makes not one jot of difference in the grand scheme as either way ebay will recover funds back and buyer will get money back so therefore all this does is make the seller a tad unhappy (was going to say something else here regarding P and off) therefore less sellers and less buyers.

Do not think ebay has thought this through unless they are deliberately trying to lose sellers and buyers which with all the other stupid things like GSPR and suchlike are killing off trade on ebay. 

Are we going down the own nothing and be miserable path yet again ?

wake up peeps...

[strangelysane]

The point is, most private sellers pitch at reasonable price - then find a buyer's fee slapped on top, tipping it over that buyer's  psychologically consider a good price. 
So, in order to sell at the original perceived reasonable price, sellers have to reduce their price by the cost of eBay's fees - thereby negating the "free to sell on eBay hype". 
Furthermore, buyers. Instinctively rail at having to pay a buyers' protection fee. They consider that inherent with long distance selling legislation and eBay's original protection scheme.

Finally,  eBay always sides with the buyers when it comes to refund requests, holding sellers to ransom until they cough up, even if the buyer appears to be gaming the system, so the 'protection fee' is just another opportunistic fee on top.

[transformationalcoaching]

Yes, more fees ebay!  What a joke.  My customers don't even know it's a buyer protection fee added by ebay. They just think I have put my prices up by weird amounts.  My turnover is down by 50% as my pricing is now out of kilter, because I priced to sell, then ebay added BPF!  Wake up ebay....do you still want people selling on the site or are your trying to get rid of us all? I am now having to go through all of my listings reducing the price to cover the buyer protection fee.  If I don't do this I won't sell anything at all...thanks ebay for thinking this through so well ( NOT)

And with Royal mail hiking postage prices up again, again, again - sellers are faced with more challenges as we try to balance the cost of selling with, making it worthwhile. at the moment the scales are tipping towards making it NOT worthwhile.  Come ebay, you are the experts, help sellers to succeed rather than close down opportunities!