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I had a fun experience too last year. After not using my account for ages I sold a few items. Was sceptical because unlike in the old days, ebay would relay the

I had a fun experience too last year. After not using my account for ages I sold a few items. Was sceptical because unlike in the old days, ebay would relay the money now and keep it a few days. However, everything worked fine, got my money, except that there was this one item where the buyer just didn't pay. When I contacted him after a week they said they're traveling and would pay a week later, so this repeated for a while until I finally have up. So I wanted to cancel the transaction, but it turned out you can only do this within 30 days. The FAQ just states after that, I should resolve the issue with the buyer. According to them, they also didn't have an option to cancel. So I had this open transaction in my ebay profile which I could only mark as payed for, but not remove in any way. Two months later it was still there. I logged in just now to check, and it is finally gone. Ebay is full of these half-baked workflows and broken functions. It is mind boggling how even today there still seems to be at least three different UI styles, depending on what part of the site you interact with. One "modern" theme that is very flat, has no borders around anything, then a somewhat older one with more boxes and lines and smaller margins, and yet another one that looks even older. Oh and now that I think of it, I have one stored search in my account that I cannot delete. Everytime I do and refresh the page, it is back again.

pxx 4y ago
The experience for sporadic sellers is probably not very good because that's not where eBay really makes its money from. I'm happy they still allow it though; sites like Amazon have just made it impossible to work as somebody who is just trying to declutter. You probably ended up paying commission on the unpaid item. This is why you should just not allow buyers extensions at all. Travel is no excuse. If they can send messages they can pay.
- iforgotpassword 4y ago
  Yeah, I learned my lesson from that, but still, how do you come up with this workflow? How can I resolve anything with the buyer directly? If we agree on not doing the transaction, how would I get rid of that thing in my seller dashboard? Like, just allow cancelling it indefinitely. What's the point here!? Also, agree on the weirdness of the buyer. What did he gain by keeping to pretend he wants the item if really he didn't? I mean I didn't care about the slowness, was just decluttering a bit, so I wasn't in a hurry or anything.
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    The sketchy workflow is because you were doing something you weren't supposed to essentially. Ebay doesn't want sellers to humor people doing scammy things. They were hoping you sent the item before they paid, or they didn't have the cashflow to complete the purchase but wanted to prevent anyone else from getting it. In ebay's world, if someone is not clearly a normal buyer, you should cancel that transaction. This goes the same for consumers, if a seller is acting weird, cancel that transaction and move on.
    - SoftTalker 4y ago
      That really is good advice for any online selling including Craigslist, FB marketplace, etc. Anyone who is acting even slightly weird is almost always just wasting your time.
      - CamperBob2 4y ago
        However, that sounds a lot like the rationale used by eBay and PayPal to hose various peoples' accounts, which we hear about on a daily basis.
- aendruk 4y ago
  > sites like Amazon have just made it impossible to work as somebody who is just trying to declutter Literally impossible. I am permanently banned from selling again for the offense of “inactivity”.
toss1 4y ago
I had a similar 'fun' experience a few years back. Sold a desktop lab oven, and when the purchase was made something was off with the payment for shipping. Since I was a long-time buyer but inexperienced seller, I thought it was just an odd UI issue that would get sorted, but in the end, I got nothing for shipping, losing over $100. It turns out that there was some deeply hidden setting that allowed "Buyer can edit invoice", and the DEFAULT was set to "YES"!?! So, this permitted them to just eliminate the shipping cost. I'm still absolutely baffled why any honest person with a clue would ever even think to set such a default. Or why a manager would allow it. Support was utterly unhelpful other than surfacing the setting; acting like it was completely my fault. Instead of the flying cars we were promised, we just get another fundamentally disorganized and dishonest company.
madaxe_again 4y ago
You should see their API documentation - it belies an awful lot about their architecture. It is also truly vast. The last version I had to wrestle with was a 2000+ page PDF. In short, it’s trash with some junk bolted on held together with garbage - insane workflows, where you can see how they started as a sleek hull and grew barnacles and then barnacles on the barnacles before sinking under their own mass, so much batch processed stuff it makes your head spin, and stuff which must have seemed like a good idea at the time. I pity any maintainer.
SoftTalker 4y ago
> Ebay is full of these half-baked workflows and broken functions. Their system works for 98% of transactions. They don’t care about the last 2%. At their scale though that still affects quite a few people
kube-system 4y ago
You're amazingly forgiving. I contact message buyers about unpaid items after 1 hour, again after 24 hours, and then at 4 days I cancel as "buyer hasn't paid"
deleted 4y ago
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pxx 4y ago

The experience for sporadic sellers is probably not very good because that's not where eBay really makes its money from. I'm happy they still allow it though; sites like Amazon have just made it impossible to work as somebody who is just trying to declutter. You probably ended up paying commission on the unpaid item. This is why you should just not allow buyers extensions at all. Travel is no excuse. If they can send messages they can pay.

iforgotpassword 4y ago
Yeah, I learned my lesson from that, but still, how do you come up with this workflow? How can I resolve anything with the buyer directly? If we agree on not doing the transaction, how would I get rid of that thing in my seller dashboard? Like, just allow cancelling it indefinitely. What's the point here!? Also, agree on the weirdness of the buyer. What did he gain by keeping to pretend he wants the item if really he didn't? I mean I didn't care about the slowness, was just decluttering a bit, so I wasn't in a hurry or anything.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  The sketchy workflow is because you were doing something you weren't supposed to essentially. Ebay doesn't want sellers to humor people doing scammy things. They were hoping you sent the item before they paid, or they didn't have the cashflow to complete the purchase but wanted to prevent anyone else from getting it. In ebay's world, if someone is not clearly a normal buyer, you should cancel that transaction. This goes the same for consumers, if a seller is acting weird, cancel that transaction and move on.
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    That really is good advice for any online selling including Craigslist, FB marketplace, etc. Anyone who is acting even slightly weird is almost always just wasting your time.
    - CamperBob2 4y ago
      However, that sounds a lot like the rationale used by eBay and PayPal to hose various peoples' accounts, which we hear about on a daily basis.
aendruk 4y ago
> sites like Amazon have just made it impossible to work as somebody who is just trying to declutter Literally impossible. I am permanently banned from selling again for the offense of “inactivity”.

toss1 4y ago

I had a similar 'fun' experience a few years back. Sold a desktop lab oven, and when the purchase was made something was off with the payment for shipping. Since I was a long-time buyer but inexperienced seller, I thought it was just an odd UI issue that would get sorted, but in the end, I got nothing for shipping, losing over $100. It turns out that there was some deeply hidden setting that allowed "Buyer can edit invoice", and the DEFAULT was set to "YES"!?! So, this permitted them to just eliminate the shipping cost. I'm still absolutely baffled why any honest person with a clue would ever even think to set such a default. Or why a manager would allow it. Support was utterly unhelpful other than surfacing the setting; acting like it was completely my fault. Instead of the flying cars we were promised, we just get another fundamentally disorganized and dishonest company.

madaxe_again 4y ago

You should see their API documentation - it belies an awful lot about their architecture. It is also truly vast. The last version I had to wrestle with was a 2000+ page PDF. In short, it’s trash with some junk bolted on held together with garbage - insane workflows, where you can see how they started as a sleek hull and grew barnacles and then barnacles on the barnacles before sinking under their own mass, so much batch processed stuff it makes your head spin, and stuff which must have seemed like a good idea at the time. I pity any maintainer.

SoftTalker 4y ago

> Ebay is full of these half-baked workflows and broken functions. Their system works for 98% of transactions. They don’t care about the last 2%. At their scale though that still affects quite a few people

kube-system 4y ago

You're amazingly forgiving. I contact message buyers about unpaid items after 1 hour, again after 24 hours, and then at 4 days I cancel as "buyer hasn't paid"

deleted 4y ago

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