eBay Hacks

Let’s Make a Deal

How to handle impatient bidders without losing customers and without getting kicked off eBay.

From time to time, bidders will contact you with special requests, such as those suggested in [Hack #26] and [Hack #27]. How you respond to such requests and how you decide to conduct business is entirely up to you, but you’ll want to be careful about some of the steps you take. As a seller on eBay, you’ll have to walk a fine line between protecting yourself from dishonest bidders, not upsetting your honest bidders, not violating eBay policy, and not wasting large amounts of your time.

Tip

See who you’re dealing with by taking a moment to look at their feedback and investigate their history, a process explained in [Hack #53]. That way, you’ll know whether you should trust the bidder or add the bidder to your Blocked Bidder list (see [Hack #54]).

For instance, an impatient bidder might want to use Buy-It-Now on one of your auctions, even though the item has received bids and the option has disappeared from the page. The following are a few different approaches to dealing with this type of request, each with its own advantages and disadvantages:

• Assuming you know the value of your item (see [Hack #33]), you should be able to look at the current bids — as well as the relative success of your competition — and predict how much you’re ultimately going to get for your item. Your auction may indeed be on track to fetch a higher amount than your original Buy-It-Now price, in which ...