Auctions that go on forever? No thanks!

WebProNews has an interesting piece proposing a solution to the problem of scamming bidders on high ticket auctions:

Now here's another reason for eBay to start thinking seriously about automatically extending auctions when late bids hit. Scammers hitting electronics auctions with inflated bids followed by requests to ship items out of the country, spoofed PayPal payment notifications, and other naughtiness ought to be enough for eBay to do something about the situation. ... If eBay enabled the ability to automatically extend an auction by a few minutes when a late bid hit at the last second, buyers and sellers could both benefit. Sellers could ban obvious fake bids, while buyers in legitimate sales would have the chance to increase their bids above the sniped amount, making more money for the seller.

I've been around eBay for a few years now, and this auto-extension option has been suggested a lot. But I've never seen it proposed as a solution to the problem of the Nigerian father who wants your mobile for his son's birthday - so kudos to Mr Utter for imagination here. But I'm afraid he's completely wrong.

There is already a solution to the problem of scamming bidders: buyer management. *Every* eBay seller should be using some of these: whether it's just blocking buyers from countries to which you don't ship, or whether you want to go the whole hog and block buyers without a credit card on file and/or without a Paypal account. Most legitimate buyers would pass this test; most scammers won't.

Auction extensions are a bad idea for a whole host of reasons. eBay buyers ALREADY expect sellers to be at their computers 24/7 (*waves to the lady who mailed me at 4am and again at 7am to complain she hadn't had a response*): extending auctions would just make things worse. It would also vastly increase the problems of bidding wars: most of us have had experience, either as buyer or seller, of two or more bidders who between them drive the auction price way above what any sane person would expect. Currently, eBay's hard ending does put a curb on that; with extensions in place, nothing would. We would just exchange one set of non-paying bidders for another.

[PS - Hey, WebProNews, how about some form of comments/trackback on your articles? No dialogue is just *so* Web 1.0 :-p ]

Bye bye Standard Protection, hello compulsory Paypal?

eBay have doubled the amount guaranteed to be refunded to Paypal buyers in the event of non-delivery or receipt of damaged goods to up to US$2000 for qualified sellers, and to US$200 or CA$315 across the board.

Well this looks nice. More protection for buyers means more confidence in the eBay marketplace, which has to be good news for everyone, buyer and seller alike. Doesn't it?

Not quite. Many eBayers, myself included, have speculated that eBay would like to force all transactions to be concluded through Paypal, and this is just one more move towards that goal, as the Standard Purchase Protection Program is being discontinued in the US and Canada. This program protected buyers who paid with non-Paypal methods such as cheques and money orders against non-receipt of their item. eBay say:

From a risk management and fraud prevention perspective, SPPP is flawed, because it offers coverage on the riskiest payment methods. This is clearly not in the best interests of the marketplace long-term.

In other words, choose to pay by a method that we don't control, where we don't take another cut of the cash and where we can't reclaim chargebacks from errant sellers like we do with Paypal... and you're on your own.

Obviously eBay don't like exposing themselves to risk. So why are they so ready to let their sellers do it? With this increase in buyer protection, sellers are left to bear even more of the risk of fraudulent chargebacks by scamming buyers. Until eBay make it possible for sellers to control the level of risk they will accept - by, for example, being able to block bidders without verified Paypal accounts and confirmed addresses - sellers remain completely over-exposed by these measures.

Preapproved bidders feature removed in UK

We blogged a fortnight ago about the new message on the US buyer management page, notifying that from January, the preapproved bidder feature will be unavailable. The UK bidder management page now has the same message. There has still not been an official announcement of this change on either site; if I could have one wish for 2007, it might be that eBay would learn to communicate site changes more effectively.

Are you turning too many buyers away?

As Christmas nears and the silly season for sales approaches it's time to review your Buyer Requirements on eBay. We've all had the customer we'd rather not, and eBay have given us the tools to prevent them from buying.

Some obvious options are to block buyers who are registered in countries that you don't ship to (though even they may temporarily be in another country and wish to buy locally), and buyers with a net negative feedback score or multiple recent unpaid item strikes may be undesirable customers.

Many eBay sellers have chosen to set a maximum number of items a buyer can purchase to prevent someone emptying their entire inventory. In the run up to Christmas it's worth considering relaxing this restriction a little as people may be buying larger quantities than usual.

Definately with eBay running TV advertising and new buyers coming to the site preventing new eBayers from buying before they register a credit card or open a PayPal account could be losing business to competitors who have less stringent requirements.

A review of buyer requirements could be worth a look, and if you've never set any before now is probably a great time to consider doing so! One thing many eBayers forget or are unaware of is that you can track how many buyers are blocked by the requirements you set. This is a handy tool as it gives a guide if you are blocking too many people and which restriction is preventing them from buying. Don't forget if you have certain customers you don't wish to block even though they fall foul of your normal restrictions you can exempt them from the blocks either direct from the buyer requirements activity log or on the Buyer/Bidder management page.

A quick change of your settings now could make a difference to your Christmas sales!