vwestlife
Veteran Member
If you thought sellers no longer being able to leave negative feedback on buyers was bad, hold on, it's going to get worse... as of next year, eBay will be forcing all sellers who offer returns to pay for the return shipping. It's their "Hassle-Free Returns" system, which means if a buyer wants to return an item, eBay will automatically generate a return shipping label for them and charge the seller the return shipping cost.
Sellers can still opt to not offer returns, but that will become nearly meaningless, because another change is that in "Item Not As Described" (NAD) cases, the seller will have to pay the return shipping cost as well. And within 6 days of the item being returned to you, eBay will automatically give the buyer a refund, unless you file a dispute against their NAD claim. And anybody who's ever dealt with that can tell you that eBay has a very wide berth of what counts as "not as described", so the chances of your dispute being successful are slim. (And that's not even counting the cases where the buyer breaks the item by their own fault, and then returns it to you, claiming that it was already broken when they got it...)
On the eBay Community forums, many people aren't happy about this, and say that if they're going to continue selling on eBay, they will be forced to raise their prices by the amount of what return shipping would cost them.
Also, eBay will be giving buyers the option to cancel their bid up to an hour after the auction ends. People predict that this will lead to buyers bidding on multiple listings of an item that end around the same time, and then only pay for the one that ended up being the lowest price, and cancelling all the rest.
The eBay Community thread of sellers complaining about the changes:
http://community.ebay.com/t5/Sellin...r-return-shipping-on-SNAD-cases/td-p/22396282
Sellers can still opt to not offer returns, but that will become nearly meaningless, because another change is that in "Item Not As Described" (NAD) cases, the seller will have to pay the return shipping cost as well. And within 6 days of the item being returned to you, eBay will automatically give the buyer a refund, unless you file a dispute against their NAD claim. And anybody who's ever dealt with that can tell you that eBay has a very wide berth of what counts as "not as described", so the chances of your dispute being successful are slim. (And that's not even counting the cases where the buyer breaks the item by their own fault, and then returns it to you, claiming that it was already broken when they got it...)
On the eBay Community forums, many people aren't happy about this, and say that if they're going to continue selling on eBay, they will be forced to raise their prices by the amount of what return shipping would cost them.
Also, eBay will be giving buyers the option to cancel their bid up to an hour after the auction ends. People predict that this will lead to buyers bidding on multiple listings of an item that end around the same time, and then only pay for the one that ended up being the lowest price, and cancelling all the rest.
The eBay Community thread of sellers complaining about the changes:
http://community.ebay.com/t5/Sellin...r-return-shipping-on-SNAD-cases/td-p/22396282