I rarely sell anything on eBay. In fact, the last time I sold anything on eBay was about 3 years ago. I recently sold a few more items on eBay to unload things that don’t fit in my pricelist or things that were unsold. I guess I’ve been away too long. In the past, I never had any problems while selling. This time though, my experience was very different.

I hate to generalize people, but all of the bad experiences this time came from one ethnic group.

One person emailed me 3 days after winning one of my lots and said, “I’m broke. I can’t pay for it now.” If you didn’t have the money, why did you bid on it? I tuned them in to eBay for not paying for an item. I also blocked him from bidding on any more of my listings. I had to relist this item and wait another 7 days for it to sell again.

Another gentleman asked if I shipped to his country. I did not. He bid on my listing anyway and won. It was a pain to try and ship the item to him. It cost $60 shipping on a $10 item. I figured out how to prevent people from other countries from bidding on my listings. Lesson leanred.

One more gentleman bid on a bunch of stuff, but took forever to pay. I blocked him from bidding too. Rather than allowing him to continue to bid and not pay for stuff, I just blocked him.

This last gentleman bid on several lots and asked me to combine them. If I did, the shipping cost was greater than the individual lot cost. As individual lots, I could send it at the Flat Rate Priority Mail Box. Combining them would have been a larger box (i.e., too big for a Flat Rate box) and it would have cost more money. It took me a while to convince him that several flat rate boxes were cheaper. I should have complied with his request and combined it into one large box and charged him extra postage since he wasn’t getting my point. Maybe it was a language barrier issue?

I also noticed that eBay now gives sellers the ability to block certain buyers. Interestingly, one of the ways you can block buyers is if they have a specified number of unpaid items from you. Incorporating something like that into the system must mean it’s not a trivial matter than some bidders buy lots of things, but are slow to pay, or never pay.

What was once a breeze ended up taking much longer this time. Again, it was largely around one ethnic group. I just didn’t seem to have any positive experiences with them.

Some aspects of selling on eBay have gotten better. Dealing with difficult buyers though has gone way up. It did for me since last selling on eBay 3 years ago.

Do you have any horror stories selling on there? Or were your experiences positive ones?