How To Deal With An eBay Customer Who Has Not Paid

Using eBay can be a great way to make some extra money, or even just to unload some of your old, unwanted stuff. But while eBay is great for selling your items, it is not always great for getting you paid for the items that you “sold.” After all, unlike a regular store – where you are paid first, and then you give the customer the item – you have to wait for a person to pay you after they win the bid; and sometimes, this can leave you waiting for a while!

The first thing you should know, if you are dealing with a customer who has won a bid but has not paid you, is that they have four days to pay. 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 they are uncooperative or – perhaps even more frustrating – unresponsive, you then need to take things to the next step, which is filing the complaint with the Resolution Center at eBay.

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. The item will go down as an unpaid item if it has gone another four days without any payment from the buyer.

This means that you can resell the item (or you can give a Second Chance Offer to one of the bidders who lost), and it means the buyer will have an “unpaid item” on their account. 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!