Hello sellers and eBay team!
I wish to drag your attention to quantum of unpaid items on eBay. To all sellers and to eBay, such sales pose unwanted cost and wastage of time. The objective of this post is to start a discussion to minimize unpaid items while maintaining traffic.
The unpaid buyers fall under these categories:
1.Apprehensive first time buyers.
2.Time pass buyers.
3.Notorious buyers.
Of these only first category buyers can be converted to actual buyers whereas rest two must be blocked. While category 2 & 3 buyers need to be blocked, they can not be identified per se. Moreover such blocking will hit traffic adversely.
What could be solution to this problem?
The concept that comes to mind is to impose an Earnest Money Payment (or any suitable name) at the time of bidding as a token, which could be adjusted suitably after end of auction or sale. In this system the buyer would be required to deposit a token amount (say 1% of bid amount, subject to a minimum and maximum) at the time of bidding in their PaisaPay account towards their bid. For winning buyer this amount would be adjusted in final payment whereas for rest of the buyers this amount would be refunded in their account. In this way we would be able to filter out buyers who do not wish to pay from the ones who wish to pay.
The concept could be fine tuned and modified further to suit the platform and a detailed cost analysis could be done by eBay to check feasibility of the concept.
Everybody is encouraged to contribute further.
