Advice for sellers on Ebay, how to avoid scammers.

Ok just some things that spring to mind when I have been selling online.

If you are just having a clearout and selling old stuff from around the house your auctions will probably never be targeted by scammers. The problems start when you are selling expensive goods like new mobile phones, laptops etc, there are actively targeted by scammers.

I have sold a couple of mobile phones before and have been targeted by a scammer trying to get the phone without paying for it.

When you are listing your auction I would make sure that in the buyer’s requirements you specify that they can only pay by Paypal and that they need to pay immediately before the auction ends, there is a tick box to specify this when you list the auction. This will prevent you from being in the situation I has in where the buyer said they were going to pay by Paypal once I had posted the mobile phone and sent a dummy Paypal report to my email account and an elaborately long winded story about how the mobile phone was for their son at University! Of course I never posted the item but that’s not the point the point is that it wasted time being able to selling the phone to a genuine buyer, and I had to wait a few days to get a refund on the auction fees from Ebay as well.

You can also block buyers from certain countries, which you can specify in the shipping section of the auction, Most of the scammers I have run into have come from South Africa.

You can also block buyers with negative feedback or buyers with no Paypal account and block buyers without a credit card on file.

Also make sure when you come to shipping auctions that you keep hold of the proof of postage receipt from the Post Office, this is your only way of getting a refund if it gets lost or damaged in the post.

Another thing that has happened to me once was a buyer claimed that the item I posted was broken in transit and wanted a full refund. I knew there was no way this could have happened because it was wrapped so well, I replied to the buyer that I would be happy to give a full refund it they post the broken item back to me and I would even refund the postage back. Needless to say I never heard anything more about it!

If you are running an auction rather than a buy it now make sure you have a look at the bidders feedback, if it looks a bit dodgy don’t be afraid to cancel the bid.

Postage make sure you get it right!

Something that can be a right pain in the arse is underestimating how much something will cost to post, if you get it wrong it can really eat into your profit for the auction. I have written a little bit on the forum about Postage costs which you might find useful.

http://www.forums.peazyshop.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=4880

Another tip regarding postage is if the package is fragile make sure you write fragile across the package. If your auction gets broken in the post and you haven’t made it clear to Royal Mail that it was a fragile item you can kiss goodbye to a refund from them!