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 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, 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!

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. Although four days can seem like ages when you are waiting for the money, eBay will not accept your complaint unless at least four full days have passed from the end of the auction. 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 is contact the buyer directly and see if you can work things out with them if they have not paid you. 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 again have four days to pay after you file a complaint with the Resolution Center (and will also, of course, be notified of the complaint). 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.

At this point, you can list your item again, or you can provide a Second Chance Offer to anyone else who bid on your item and lost; this also means that the "unpaid item" will go on the buyer's account. And keep in mind: you can look at people's accounts when they are bidding, and if you run into a bidder with an "unpaid item" on their account, you can block them to keep this from happening to you!