Buyers enter a legal contract under English law when closing a deal on ebay.

[30terrym]

Although the buyer enters a Legal Contract under English Law, and then doesn't pay, Ebay are very weak to carry out harsh sentencing.

Short of taking the buyer to court (which is an expensive undertaking) in my opinion ebay do not take strong enough action.

Protection under Ebay Rules has greatly favoured the buyer over many years. The poor old seller ends up getting a NEGATIVE FEED BACK for no particular reason, which Ebay do nothing about.

To try to get the balance back  someway towards equal, my suggestion is to Ebay that buyers who enter into a contract, and then do not pay up should receive a NEGATIVE FEEDBACK. Perhaps then they might think twice before before pressing the buy button.

30terrym.

[m25jet]

Although I agree that eBay's feedback system is very heavily biased in favour of the buyer, there is no way in Hell that eBay would ever reconsider the possibility of reinstating the option for sellers to leave buyers negative feedback, which they did away with over a decade ago.

One mistake that a lot of sellers make with non-paying buyers, much to the detriment of other sellers who subsequently have the misfortune to have to do business with those timewasters, is to leave them a negative comment on a green dot.  Not only is this a breach of eBay's feedback policy it could also get sellers who do that a defect on their account if the buyer saw the comment and asked eBay to remove it.  However, if sellers were to resist the temptation to do that and instead opted to open an Unpaid Item Dispute and closed it at the first chance that they were given if the buyer had still have failed to pay up by that point, then non-paying timewasters who amass two or more Unpaid Item Strikes during a twelve month period would find it extremely difficult to find a seller that they can actually purchase anything from, as most savvy sellers have got their Selling Preferences set up to automatically block timewasters who have received two or more Unpaid Item Strikes on their account during the past twelve months.