How To Deal With An eBay Customer Who Has Not Paid

With eBay, you can make some extra money on the side of your job, or you can get rid of stuff you no longer want. But while eBay is a great place to sell your items, it can quickly become not-so-great if someone is not paying you for the item you “sold.” After all, eBay does not operate like a regular store, where you get paid for something and then give the item to the customer; instead, on eBay, the customer wins a bid, and you have to wait for them to pay you before you can truly consider it to be “sold.”

Customers on eBay have four days to pay, which is important to keep in mind if you are dealing with a customer who has not paid you for an item of yours they won. Even though this seems like a while, eBay will not take a complaint unless it has been at least four days from the day when the auction ended. If four full days pass without a payment, however, eBay starts to take it very seriously, doing what they can to help resolve the issue.

The first thing you need to do, if someone has not paid you, is contact them and see if you can work things out. If you contact the buyer and they either will not cooperate with you or will not respond to your messages, you can take the next step and file a complaint with eBay’s Resolution Center.

The buyer will be notified after you file a complaint with the Resolution Center, and they will again have four days to pay. They are allowed to contact you during this time and ask for an extension or try to make some other arrangement, but you are under no obligation to agree. If it goes another four days and they still have not paid, this item will go down as an unpaid item.

This unpaid item will be listed permanently on the buyer’s account, and you are then able to list your item again, or you can give a Second Chance Offer to one of the bidders who lost on the item. And when you sell your items on eBay, keep this in mind: you are able to look at the accounts of those who are bidding on your items, and if you find unpaid items in their history, you can protect yourself by blocking them from bidding on the things you list!