The Death of Auctions?

[ett1954]

Has anyone seen this gem to come soon in the summer update to affect auctions (my bold italics):

Reducing unpaid items

Placing a bid

Additionally, buyers on select auctions will be required to set up a preferred payment method and postal address before they can place a bid. After winning an auction, they’ll have one hour to adjust their order or payment details, otherwise we’ll automatically process their order using their preferred payment method. No action is required from the seller.

These changes will help to improve the auction process on eBay by providing buyers with the ability to decide how they want to pay, whilst also ensuring that sellers receive payment for their sales. The goal is to foster a more efficient and dependable experience for the entire eBay community.

From FAQs:

No changes are needed with how you set up your listings. You should expect to see fewer unpaid items on items sold through auctions as we test and launch changes.

You can still combine multiple purchases from the same buyer in a single shipment, but please be aware that a buyer may be automatically charged for postage costs for each individual item when payments are processed.

As a buyer, you may be prompted to provide a payment method and select a postal address prior to placing a bid on an auction. You'll have the ability to edit these details before the auction ends. If you win the auction, you'll be given a one hour period to make any changes. If no changes are made, we’ll automatically charge your default payment method. 

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There is no opt out mentioned for this 'feature'; without one it will be the end of auctions on eBay for me.  A few things immediately spring to mind.  I don't have problems with non-payers but I do have regular, long-standing buyers of 8 years or more who bid on items spanning across 10 days or even longer.  Combining multiple wins into one order is a necessity; especially with lower value items.

Many of my buyers are international and on a completely different time zone - what they win can determine how and where they want it sent (forwarding agents, etc.)  How do they respond in an hour if an auction is finishing at 3 am for them, or if they are at work, travelling, etc.

I had thought eBay had learnt their lesson from the debacle of immediate payments on Buy it Now listings.  My acceptance level from offers sent is now virtually nil.  What I do foresee is an increase in 'remorse' returns for business sellers running auctions in some sectors.  Sure we will see a lot less non-payers ..... this will be in conjunction with a lot less sales.

One final question for eBay - where is this supposed feedback you received stating sellers want this ........ nobody has asked me.  Has anyone on these boards been asked?  Please publish this data along with the agency you commissioned to carry out the research.

[kath3735_wxmjn]

and when people do comment because they do not agree with you you post an arrogant response.  Not sure why you are commenting if you do not do auctions anyway.  All this drama would be avoided if they had said there would be an opt out option which there should be.    I am a very tiny private seller and it does not really affect me much because i do not do combined postage but it certainly will affect me in regard to the amount of times someone buys something and then decides they do not want it and so then make up an excuse to return it.  Better a non payment than a return in my opinion.

[kath3735_wxmjn]

Pretty sure Amazon was hacked a few years ago, maybe i am wrong, someone will be sure to tell me!!

[kath3735_wxmjn]

Is there an organisation existing that has not been hacked at some time?   Its the new pasttime for those with nothing better to do and criminals.

[1956glyn]

Our Ebay account got "hacked" once 😞

What was really odd was that i was messaging with Ebay CS in Asia at the time about a different matter and they said wait let me check your account.   So i sat back and then started to notice things being listed on our account !    Basically cheap clothes from Asia !!   This seemed a huge coincidence at the time.       We obv then had to go down the hacked account route.

[*help_no_brakes*]

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@kath3735_wxmjn wrote:

of course i do which is why, as i have already said, is that i block the bidder.  Trouble is that i am not convinced that e bay actually do block some of these serial non bidders.  The other point is that i do my bit by blocking them but if they then keep on doing it to say person a,b,c etc and they do not then nothing happens.  Whereas if e bay had something in place to automatically block a buyer who say has six non payments then it would not matter if other sellers did not actually activly block them.   To be honest it was only coming on these boards when i first started selling that i actually got to know a lot of things about selling and blocking bidders was one of them.  E Bay do not have the clearest information.

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Thank you for your reply.

I do not need eBay to do that for me.

I'm comfortable with knowing that aBuyer with 2 or more UPI Strikes will not be able to bid/make an offer on my items due to my Buyer Requirements.

[a45heaven]

Again i agree - does it not strike you as odd that ebay have sent out dictates wanting members Private information ? - first it was the NI Numbers (which HMRC state not to be shared) , now its access to our payment sources - it seems that all our info is being presented to whoever can breach what ever security ebay may have.

[kempseykate]

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@*help_no_brakes* wrote:

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@kath3735_wxmjn wrote:

of course i do which is why, as i have already said, is that i block the bidder.  Trouble is that i am not convinced that e bay actually do block some of these serial non bidders.  The other point is that i do my bit by blocking them but if they then keep on doing it to say person a,b,c etc and they do not then nothing happens.  Whereas if e bay had something in place to automatically block a buyer who say has six non payments then it would not matter if other sellers did not actually activly block them.   To be honest it was only coming on these boards when i first started selling that i actually got to know a lot of things about selling and blocking bidders was one of them.  E Bay do not have the clearest information.

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Thank you for your reply.

I do not need eBay to do that for me.

I'm comfortable with knowing that aBuyer with 2 or more UPI Strikes will not be able to bid/make an offer on my items due to my Buyer Requirements.

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But as @kath3735_wxmjn pointed out, those blocks only come into being IF previous sellers have gone down the report route.
If I had bought 4 items that I hadn't paid for, but those sellers hadn't done the proper unpaid item report, preferring to leave the shouty negative comment on a green dot, then I would STILL be able to bid/buy on your items and not pay.
If ebay had done automatic blocks on me (instead of leaving it to the seller) then I wouldn't be able to bid /buy your items.

[*help_no_brakes*]

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@kempseykate wrote:

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@*help_no_brakes* wrote:

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@kath3735_wxmjn wrote:

of course i do which is why, as i have already said, is that i block the bidder.  Trouble is that i am not convinced that e bay actually do block some of these serial non bidders.  The other point is that i do my bit by blocking them but if they then keep on doing it to say person a,b,c etc and they do not then nothing happens.  Whereas if e bay had something in place to automatically block a buyer who say has six non payments then it would not matter if other sellers did not actually activly block them.   To be honest it was only coming on these boards when i first started selling that i actually got to know a lot of things about selling and blocking bidders was one of them.  E Bay do not have the clearest information.

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Thank you for your reply.

I do not need eBay to do that for me.

I'm comfortable with knowing that aBuyer with 2 or more UPI Strikes will not be able to bid/make an offer on my items due to my Buyer Requirements.

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But as @kath3735_wxmjn pointed out, those blocks only come into being IF previous sellers have gone down the report route.
If I had bought 4 items that I hadn't paid for, but those sellers hadn't done the proper unpaid item report, preferring to leave the shouty negative comment on a green dot, then I would STILL be able to bid/buy on your items and not pay.
If ebay had done automatic blocks on me (instead of leaving it to the seller) then I wouldn't be able to bid /buy your items.

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 i agree with you & am aware that it relies on other sellers correctly cancelling as Unpaid.

That is why I mentioned UPI STRIKES.

[insidethe93]

Thanks for replying.

I didn't want my post (the one you've thoughtfully replied to) to be too detailed or involved.

I knew my card provider had/has a list of my most-used merchants and selling platforms, which was why I was perplexed, when my card was renewed last year, that transactions (all on one selling platform, not eBay) were being automatically declined. The platform kept asking me to click a button to "verify" for each transaction, retried payment collection, but re-declined. For a while I was in phone ping-pong between card platform and card provider, until I happened on a more wide awake person at the card provider who explained various security measures, including new routine ones, and the maximum daily transaction (which in hindsight is sensible). I can't remember if it was especially triggered by having a new card.

They put through my declined transactions, and got me to re-confirm (and slightly increase) the list of pre-approved merchants. I asked what the daily maximum was, but they said they couldn't tell me or anyone. They did say that it didn't matter how small the £amounts were.

I now tend to gradually gather several purchases in the basket then check-out so that they form one transaction, and sometimes I've done that several times a day with no problems so far.

[ett1954]

@dch2112011   Thanks for that series of definitions, certainly useful, however it doesn't solve the issue of how eBay have set this up whereby each individual winning bid will be paid by the buyer after one hour.  Multiple purchases spread over several days or more entail the buyer paying any tax on the full price (including postage) before a combined order discount can be applied whether by invoice or refund.  If a refund was then given on each, or even one order this would represent an overpayment of tax by the buyer, with obviously a higher fee take on the seller (maybe this is the intention!).

While these over-payments on tax and overcharges on fees may be inconsequential on low value / low size shipments, they are not insignificant on higher value shipments (see my previous comment of a recent multi-item shipment to Australia).

Rather than a tool to prevent non-payers this appears to be an attempt to grab cash as quickly as possible from the payment process.  I can understand why some sellers want the money quickly; bills to pay, wages, cash flow difficulties, etc. but it does make one wonder whether eBay has a cash flow problem. 🤔

eBay could drastically reduce the amount of non-payers overnight.  They know who has unpaid strikes against them, they could impose sanctions on buyers with 'x' number of strikes such as require them to register a payment method before bidding. 

[bcstampsuk]

This is an absolutely insane change which suggests eBay (and some posters on this thread) do not have the slightest understanding of eBay stamp auctions. I list a couple of hundred auctions every week, majority of my buyers are International and majority of my orders are combined orders. All auctions start at £1.50 whether item likely to sell for £10 or £1000. I allow combining for 30 days, most buyers combine for 2-3 days before paying, some use the full 30 days which I am totally fine with.

As an example one of my regular buyers pays roughly every 10 days. He buys a mix of differently priced items, but his orders usually end up going International Tracked which I offer him at a discount. He currently has 17 items waiting to combine - most of these items with £2.20 International postage, one of them with £7.20 Tracked as only option. Under this new system I would be sitting with 17 payments and probably £42 of overpaid postage. Am I expected to wake up every morning and my first task of the day is to process a ton of postage refunds? Today is a quiet day for our orders, but still looks like those would have generated 10 postage refunds.

Many, many other problems with this idea, a huge one being the impact of last second bidding. I presume as soon as this starts being tested all automated bid sniping software will fail on hitting a test auction?

Am pretty confident this will not go live on a wide spread basis without an opt out, testing is going to show endless totally foreseeable problems, just hope I am not part of the test.

marco@ebay  - my listings are setup as per the screenshot below - Accept combined payments / Allow buyers to send one combined payment for all items purchased / Time period to combine payments = 30 days.

Can you confirm eBay will not be changing this to "Time period to combine payments = 1 hour" as any part of testing?

[dch2112011]

I must admit I did not for a minute understand the ramifications of IOSS and ebay  or any other platform for that matter until you highlighted it - you learn something every day  

Indeed it rings alarm bells if the new auction system conflicts with the seemingly good process of combining orders prior to payment which unifies several orders to one for the purposes of IOSS - as a side issue this also may explain why buyers claim to be charged twice for charges if the seller inadvertently allows the unified order to exceed the financial threshold. 

It is a big problem not having clarity or experiance of how the new system will in reality work,  Can you opt out of IOSS ebay and register for IOSS yourself - I think I can guess that the answer is no under ebay rules ! It is worth a thought - clutching at straws.

You seem to be stuck wih the way ebay interpret and implement IOSS you would surely hope that ebay would not conflict the two systems. 

This is a very serious reason for ebay to clarify and explain how it fits in with the proposed change. I cannot see a way to work around it as you can quite easily with non EU orders .

It would be good if other members could put some thought to this problem and whether they have any tangible suggestions to provide a work aroound just in case ebay do put the systems in conflict.  

Even better would be an honest and thorough appraisal by ebay to try and avoid such a conflict.

It is an interesting but potentially damaging scenario - which could as you explained have deep ramifications for you and I am sure other sellers, it is worthy of some serious thought.

[dch2112011]

With regards to cash grab by ebay -

A thought that has followed that theme is that if this is not being introduced to react to members demands that something should be done to stop buyers winning and walking away without paying but is a tactic to purely gather lost income from non payers:

How many non payers must there be to justify such a change ? - Are non payers really on such a vast scale that it would warrant such a decision?

The only influence on my thoughts are the repeated complaints about non payers across the internet and our past experiance of non payers when running auctions in bulk, so i can conclude it is a problem but what scale of a problem - everybody has different opinions - again honesty and clarity would go a long way from ebay -  at least informed opinions and actions could be formed by members.

[dch2112011]

I for one had no understanding how you administer stamp sales with auctions -  a question - would you have to refund postage on each individual order until you reach the combined postage rate or could you refund the total reduction from one of the orders ?  

I certainly hope that the system you currently employ takes precedent over any proposed change ie that if you have the settings that you currently employ that it would block the demand for payment to be automatically being taken after 1 hour - on the basis that it is a seller decision to allow payments to be delayed which is different to a buyer deciding to not pay or delay payment.

With a bit of luck ebay will come back to you with a positive answer.

[a45heaven]

I tend to agree - the none payer is just a blind for ebay to take monies in, not all refunds will be made in compensation for double postage payments to buyers - the sellers will be held as scape goats.

The last recollection i have of this was the blaming on excessive postage's being charged on items in place of the item price, where by ebay slapped fees to include postage - plain lie nothing less.

[bcstampsuk]

If a buyer bought a small number of high priced items then yes, you could refund against one order after calculating the refund amount. But if, as is common, a buyer buys a large number of cheaper items then the postage refund involved becomes way more than the total of any individual order and everything gets even more complicated. Might even end up with account defects if eBay thinks full order refunds are in effect seller initiated cancellations? Although in practise there would be huge reduction in buyers buying a large number of cheaper items if they were being automatically charged. Buyers would only know I was going to refund from text in my item description. eBay currently state on all my listings:

"Free P&P on each additional eligible item you buy from bcstampsuk." - this would surely have to be removed if the caveat was only if you manually checkout, within one hour, even though it might be middle of the night.

Refunds in eBay are already an massive accounting nuisance. Our sales information is automatically entered into Quickbooks though the API, but we have to enter refunds manually into QB. Usually only 3/4 a month, but still significantly adding to the time spent on the accounts. In the situation being suggested I'd probably need to develop a system to automate refund entry - going back to the QB API which I haven't touched for years.

Currently when buyers pay for postage on two orders being combined, say a buyer who pays for some items on Friday night then wins more over the weekend, I try to avoid making a refund. For UK buyers I include a mint First Class stamp in the order to offset the postage, for an International buyer I add them a list of buyers to get free postage on their next order. Obviously totally impractical in the situation being suggested by eBay.

[a45heaven]

Does a well designed new system, lump all the burden on the paying sellers to complete the work and communications?

As highlighted at the end of april 2024, even a Mentor - rainbowtrax - and myself highlighted a serious flaw in the newly designed Refund System by ebay - that information is part of that supposedly being forwarded to HMRC.

The fault still exists.

Fit for purpose developments? 

[dch2112011]

yes you explained very well indeed how your startegy works and really it could impact badly -  my biggest concern is the erosion of individuality within the framework of ebay  - although the basis of your reward / incentive is along the same lines as to how we operate the sales methodology  via auctions is the polar opposite to the direction we went in.

I must say you seem to have succeeded where we threw in the towel and changed direction which has changed somewhat my viewpoint - my experiance with auctions in bulk was frustrating even though we sold product in number.

I am converted to combined payments for sellers who use your or similar startegies - to us they are non existant other than for premium customers who buy in number who get discounts and sweeteners  but this is individual to them and dealt with by BIN special listings.

I am going to post some potential work arounds - which stink but will work - so i wait for the fallout !

I really hope this is sorted for you and others - you have a great strategy and I bet your customers really appreciate you making them feel special 

[dch2112011]

To answer your question Yes that is exactly how most rollouts work with big organisations - roll it out and learn by trial and error - you are the guinea pig who trys it, breaks it, hates it, but provides the information to tweak it, change it, mend it 

In the mean time you suffer, you lose, you give up, you destroy your business - but hey it  eventually pays off for the  ' future members ' 

It is all the more frustrating when large organisations will not be open and honest with their members / customers - they might surprise themselves if they were - people generally like to help people 

Sorry that was a bit cynical 

[ett1954]

marco@ebay  Marco, thanks for sticking your head above the parapet on this one; it is appreciated even though at times it might not appear that way.  Most, if not all, members here realise you are only the messenger and can only transmit information and answers you are provided with, so please don't take anything personally.

If you have been following this thread you will have realised it has created a substantial amount of debate, some of it fractious at times, but nevertheless on the whole constructive in identifying the serious issues this new 'feature', for want of a less polite description, has raised together with the various procedures that have been suggested may provide a workaround.  You will note the various business models used by different members which also demonstrates that 'one size will not fit all'.  It would be fair to say that the general consensus to this forthcoming 'feature' from contributors to this thread is negative to say the least.

If I could take the eBay suggestion ( I will not call it yours) proposed:  "Regarding combining shipping, yes, you still can combine shipping.   However, it is true that your buyer might be charged individually for each item. If this happens, for the moment we recommend refunding any excess charged in postage."  Whilst this will work with domestic (UK) orders (with the laborious exercise of refunding on each order), this will not be possible with orders to those countries where eBay has collected the tax (EU countries, United States, Australia, Norway, etc. etc.) as there is no way to consolidate such orders into a single order and conform correctly to the customs requirements in those countries - the only way to do this by regular carriers such as Royal Mail would be to send each transaction individually.

Marco, from the scant information provided so far it appears your developers have not only thought this through but they propose to test it 'on the fly'.  I think it is important that you convey the trepidation you will have read on this thread, particularly concerning their apparent belief that everything will be fine - just refund and combine.  This will not work in many cases, as demonstrated.

Without at least an opt out, but preferably a scrapping of the whole 'dogs dinner' of a feature chaos will reign.  Tackle and penalise the non-payers and not the 99.9% of buyers and sellers who cause no issues and just want an easy-to-use experience on eBay.

I trust you will make every effort to transmit this concern to the highest level, not just one of those special teams, which frankly most experienced forum members don't belief actually exist due to the complete lack of feedback ever received.  It would be greatly appreciated.