Section 179. Make Sure You Don t Get Burned Selling Tickets

179. Make Sure You Don't Get Burned Selling Tickets

BEFORE YOU BEGIN

149 About Problem Buyers

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Because tickets are time sensitive, if you run into problems with a buyer, you could end up not being able to sell your tickets. When selling tickets, you must be more careful dealing with buyers than when selling most other items.

Most of eBay's fraud protections are designed to cover the buyer, not the seller. To ensure that you don't get burned by buyers of your tickets, you must take matters into your own hands. Follow these tips, and you'll help make sure that you don't get burned:

• Accept only PayPal payments PayPal payments are instantaneous. You're either paid or you're notno bounced checks, "the money is in the mail" excuses, or similar problems. In short, you're guaranteed payment. For details about setting up a PayPal account and accepting payments, go to www.paypal.com.

• Know your buyer Check the buyer's feedback information so you know ahead of time whether you might have a problem buyer on your hands. To check out another eBay member's feedback, click his name on an auction page, and you'll see all the feedback that he has received.

• Set a minimum positive rating for buyers When you create your auction, in your description tell potential buyers that you'll only sell to those who have a certain minimum feedback rating. You can tell a member's feedback rating by looking at the number in parentheses after the member's ID. What minimum rating you'll accept is based on personal preferences, but be careful if someone doesn't have a rating above 5 or 10.

  TIP

  If you set a minimum positive feedback rating for your bidders, you won't have to deal with people who have bad track records or who are so new to eBay that you can't tell what kind of track records they have. You can also specify that you won't sell to anyone with any negative feedback whatsoever.

  
  

• Ship using a tracking number and insurance If you ship the tickets with some type of tracking or delivery confirmation and the buyer claims she never received the ticket, you have confirmation that she did.

• Ship tickets only after you've received payment and the payment has gone through This one sounds obvious, but you'd be surprised at how persuasive some scammers can be and the excuses they can dream up. So never violate this rule.

• Create a blocked bidder/buyer list If you've had a bad experience with a bidder or have heard of other sellers who have, you can block specific people from bidding on your auction. Go to http://offer.ebay.com/ws2/eBayISAPI.dll?bidderblocklogin and follow the instructions on this eBay page to block specific members from bidding on your auctions.