Blocking eBay Bidders

Written by nickel - 6 Comments

Yet another piece of unsolicited eBay advice… In the time that I’ve been selling on eBay, I’ve been fortunate enough to not have had any runins with deadbeat bidders. Yet. But if you sell enough items, it’s really just a matter of time before you’ll end up having problems. So what can you do to minimize your chances of running into trouble? One of the best ways to protect yourself is to specify that you reserve the right to refuse to sell to bidders with negative feedback (I have a bit of boilerplate text that lists the terms and conditions of all my auctions). Then simply monitor your auction(s) and keep an eye on the feedback of the bidders.

If you see anyone with particularly troubling feedback, just cancel their bid and then hop on over to the bidder management page where you can block them from bidding on your auctions. While this won’t head off all problems, it can help minimize your troubles. Blocking bidders is also a good idea if you’ve had a particularly negative experience with a bidder in the past, especially if they’ve left retaliatory feedback. After all, you don’t want an angry eBayer bidding on your auctions just to cause trouble and leave negative feedback. While this won’t keep out the most determined troublemakers — they can just make a new account if they really want to mess with you — it can be pretty effective at keeping run of the mill deadbeats at bay. Your blocked bidder list can contain up to 1,000 usernames at any one time, so there’s no need to prune it all that regularly. And while you might lose a few bids, they’re more than likely coming from people who won’t pay, or will otherwise create problems, so that’s no real loss. Besides, there are an awful lot of fish (i.e., bidders) in the sea (i.e., eBay) so blocking a few shouldn’t have a perceptible impact on your final selling prices.

Published on September 5th, 2005 - 6 Comments
Filed under: Online
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Comments (scroll down to add your own):

Interesting information I did not know. Thanks!
Comment by Financial Fruition — Sep 6th 2005 @ 4:02 pm
I do believe it also prevents the reporting of feedback (not 100% sure, but I’ve negatively dinged someone and then added them to a blocked list and they never sought “revenge”).

There are also new filters you can add to your new auctions that allow only bidders that meet a certain criteria to bid. For example, one is a “no negative feedback” bidder checkbox.
Comment by jim — Sep 7th 2005 @ 11:56 am
Good advice, thanks fcn! Same goes for Jim’s tip about the checkbox. I’ll look for that the next time I list something on eBay.
Comment by tdfb — Sep 8th 2005 @ 1:15 pm
How much does it cost for using those filters, though?
Comment by Blaine Moore — Sep 9th 2005 @ 8:53 am
Non payers are a problem. I recently had a guy purchase over $1000 worth of my items and then never pay. Not much you can do in that situation except get the final value fees refunded and move on. Second chance offers may sell a few of the items, but certainly not all. If you sell on ebay on a regular basis, you have to account that into your costs, just as stores account for theft.
Comment by SavingAdvice — Sep 9th 2005 @ 11:28 am