eBay Best Offer Immediate Payment is live and fantastic for sellers, it means that when someone submits a Best Offer against one of your listings, the second you accept the offer you get paid.
Buy It Now listings have been Immediate Payment for some years now – if you add something to your shopping basket it’s not yours until you pay for it. However, there are some instances where you can buy without paying (notably Best Offers and Auctions), and in these cases eBay want to eradicate unpaid items.
eBay have started to test Immediate Payment for auction style listings in the US in August this year with a small group of buyers. The aim is to test how this impacts buyers behaviour before rolling out Immediate Payment more widely on the marketplace. We’ve not seen this in the UK yet, but fully expect that once live in the US that it will be a worldwide rollout.
Best Offer Immediate Payment is now live however, and this removes one more obstacle for sellers to be paid. Before, if you accepted a Best Offer, you had to wait for the buyer to decide to pay and this not only might take a couple of days, but a very small percentage of buyers would express remorse and end up not paying at all. With Best Offer Immediate Payment this hurdle has gone and the only reason a buyer might not pay is if they simply don’t have sufficient funds in their bank account when the offer is accepted… in which case the transaction won’t be processed and the offer won’t be finalised.
The final step for eBay will be immediate payment for auctions, but there is one tweak that still needs a solution and that’s for buyers who submit multiple offers or bid on multiple auctions in the knowledge that the seller offers combined shipping. We’re still waiting to see what solution eBay comes up with for this to enable savings on shipping costs (which benefits both the buyer with economies of a single parcel for multiple purchases, and the seller who with a single payment saves on the fixed cost payment processing fee).
2 Responses
Ebay are so consumed with free shipping
There is little chance of any effort with the combined shipping issue! Also
Best offers may now have immediate payment
With an instant cancel order/ return request
eBay really didn’t think things through if they think immediate payment on auctions is universally good idea. The vast majority of my repeat customers like to delay payment to combine shipping; this would make it a lot more problematic.