Auction Business & eCommerce Frank Ross on 13 Feb 2007 08:35 pm
Non Paying Bidders on eBay
Ah, those non paying bidders (NPB) on eBay. The ones that still think placing a bid is like window shopping. It seems the more we grow our listings on eBay, the more NPBs we get. In speaking with other sellers, I am under the impression that NPBs simply scale with your eBay business.
I have a theory about why NPBs persist on eBay. I think that many buyers may have a hard time with the commitment to pay on something that they wanted or thought they wanted.
What happens in a regular physical auction when you bid on something, win the auction, and then refuse to pay? In general, you are scolded and are probably blacklisted from that auction house. This is more or less the model eBay follows.
I suspect that many eBay buyers don’t get the auction connection and think of eBay in terms of retail. What happens when you’re in a store (say WalMart), put something in your cart, then get up to the checkout and decide you didn’t want the item — for whatever reason? It’s no big deal there; you simply give the item to the cashier and the cashier places it in a restock bin. Even online shopping systems work this way. If you order something online, you generally have the opportunity to remove it from your shopping cart prior to actually checking out.
eBay’s auction listings more or less fly in the face of this. In spite of eBay’s best efforts to inform them otherwise, I suspect that with many buyers it just doesn’t sink in that there is a real commitment to pay.
Tags: Non Paying Bidders, eBay Non Paying Bidders, eBay Buyers, Buying on eBay
on 15 Feb 2007 at 3:39 am 1.bonni said …
Interesting. I think this also might point somewhat to the notion many people have that the online auction model is becoming outmoded. People seem more inclined to want to buy the items, go through the checkout (take things out if they wish) and pay for it, expecting it to show up in their mailbox in a reasonable period of time, the end.
I suspect eBay hoped to address that with eBay Express, but from what I’m reading, Express isn’t quite the success they were hoping for…
Thanks for the good article. Definitely something to think about in terms of e-commerce in general.
on 07 Mar 2007 at 6:32 pm 2.Common Sense eCommerce » I’ll Take the Pink One! said …
[…] In this post, I talked about the mindset of non paying eBay buyers as maybe actually being ‘retail buyers’. I think this example illustrates this mindset perfectly. This buyer simply picked up 2 different variants of the same item and then decided on one. Not unlike what a buyer would do in a typical retail store or online store. […]
on 01 Apr 2007 at 3:07 am 3.heather said …
Two weeks ago I had 4 non-paying bidders. I could handle that if they were for small items but they were for up to $250.00 large lots of clothing. I could not believe that bidders will jump in at the last moment when they never bidder on the auction up until then, and steal the auction from bidders that very much wanted the auction from the beginning. very frusterating!