Dealing with Unpaid Items

Ugh. I have my eBay items all set to require immediate payment, but when I accept an offer on an item, I cannot require immediate payment. As my sales increase, my unpaid item cases are increasing. I have had a ridiculously high number of unpaid item cases over the past two weeks. When I make a sale, I count on actually getting that money. (Silly me!) When I never see the money, it's extremely frustrating. 

It's bad enough that I have to deal with the unpaid item cases. What would be even worse is if I actually had to devote TIME to dealing with them. Did you know you can set your eBay preferences to deal with UPI's automatically? Follow these steps to set up the Unpaid Item Assistant:

• My eBay
• Account Tab
• Site Preferences
• At the bottom of the Selling Preferences section, find Unpaid Item Assistant
• All the way to the right, click on Show
• Click on Edit

In this section, you can choose how you want your UPI assistant to operate. My Terms of Service indicate that I expect payment within 3 days, so I have my UPI Assistant set to open a case after 4 days. I also like to be notified when a case is opened or closed, so I have those options set to Real-Time. I also have eBay automatically relist the item once the case closes.

Using these settings, I don't have to do a thing. I do send out a second invoice on day 3, just to be nice, but really - I don't even HAVE to do that. Ebay sends them a payment reminder anyway.

So while it's nice to be hands-off during this process, it's still extremely frustrating. The only other thing I could do to totally prevent UPI cases would be to remove Best Offer from all my listings and check Immediate Payment Required. I am slowly moving in that direction. I have removed the Best Offer option from most of my shoe listings (and am working on editing the rest to remove it from them as wel), and I am working on removing Best Offer from most of my children's clothing listings. But there are always going to be items that I'm just not exactly sure about pricing, so I'll need to keep Best Offer on some stuff.  But I'm hoping that making these changes will drastically cut down on the number of UPI cases I have to open.

Oh - if you have a buyer who has contacted you to let you know they'll be able to pay next payday and you are ok with that, you CAN turn off the UPI assistant for just that transaction! You don't want a case opening against a buyer that's actually communicating. To turn the assistant off, go into your sold items and find the item. Then click on the menu on the right and choose Turn Unpaid Item Assistant Off. From there, eBay will give you a warning message. Just click on Yes (or OK or Submit or Agree or whatever it is) and that will turn the UPI assistant off for that one transaction, which will give your buyer extra time to pay.

How about you? How do you deal with non-payers?