A few days ago, I wrote about How to cancel arbitrage sales on eBay avoiding negative feedback. This gleaned from personal experience as I’d just suffered a sale that was cancelled because the seller didn’t actually have the stock but now eBay have sent me Don’t Miss Out email suggesting I complete the purchase!
It turns out that the eBay seller had scraped a supplier site and managed to sell a product that wasn’t available. I was annoyed enough at discovering that the stock wasn’t in Liverpool (yes location abuse as well) but to then discover that the item would never arrive was a pretty poor buying experience. The seller cancelled the transaction supposedly at my request but actually because they gave me little choice but to say “Yes, refund me”. So having had a cancelled transaction it’s a bit annoying for eBay to bug me with the Don’t Miss Out email.
Since the seller cancelled the transaction, the item is definitely not in my shopping basket as the email suggests. In fairness to eBay, this is probably an edge case and they haven’t realised that they’re sending the Don’t Miss Out email in cases where the transaction has been cancelled.
The email did prompt me to check the original listing again – having told me that they were unable to get the stock and had cancelled the out of stock sizes and colours, it would appear that the seller has relisted them (perhaps unknowingly if their software has overridden any manual changes made). Bad news as it can only lead to further cancelled transactions and annoyed eBay buyers.
It is worth emphasising that there is nothing wrong with drop shipping if you have a drop ship agreement with your supplier and are confident that they have stock and are able to deliver. If you’re scraping sites in the hope that you’ll be able to order when you get a sale without an agreement with the supplier then this is arbitrage and sooner or later the seller will be forced to let buyers down.
2 Responses
Arbitrage is not the majority of these incidents. Ebays continuing push for speedier deliveries and longer returns and every other possible thing that the big companies can manage easily, means the smaller companies are rushing around like headless chickens trying to fulfill orders quickly and so do not get the time to keep updating stock in and out and at the same time answer messages and calls and check items before shipping for damages etc. They also do not have the money available to buy expensive stock control software again like the big companies. So when a mistake happens now everyone will scream “Arbitrage” !!! instead of hearing the buyers reasoning.
So keep on upping the bar eBay for you big boys and sit back watching the little businesses keep falling down.
“In fairness to eBay, this is probably an edge case and they haven’t realised that they’re sending the Don’t Miss Out email in cases where the transaction has been cancelled.”
Why would they? There are so many other silly things wrong with the site, like when you get a message from a buyer regarding an order and it shows a blue button saying “View Order Details” even though it takes you to the listing page, NOT the order page as you would expect it to.
Things like the above have been a problem for ages without being fixed