Section 178. About Accepting Money and Shipping the Tickets

178. About Accepting Money and Shipping the Tickets

BEFORE YOU BEGIN

147 About Accepting Payments

SEE ALSO

150 Ship the Goods

151 Pay the eBay Fees

You accept payments for tickets on eBay the same way you do for other items, so for more details on how to get your money from the buyer, turn to 147 About Accepting Payments . The same general rules hold true for shipping tickets as for shipping other items, so for details about shipping, see 150Ship the Goods .

However, you should take into account a number of things when accepting payments for and shipping tickets:

• Accept only immediate payment methods , such as PayPal. Tickets are time sensitive, and after their date passes , you can't sell them anymore. If you accept payment methods that require mailing (such as checks or money orders), the payment could get held up or lost, you could be sent a bad check, or similar problems might occur. As you're waiting for the payment to arrive or the check to clear after you've deposited it, the ticket event date might creep up and pass you by. In that case, you'd be out of luck because the buyer could back out. (For details about setting up a PayPal account and receiving PayPal payments, go to www.paypal.com.)

• Immediately follow up your auction closing with an email to the high bidder. Because tickets are time sensitive, you want to have enough time to relist them if something goes wrong with the first buyer.

• Require that payment be made within one or two days of your auction closing. Again, tickets are time sensitive; if you don't receive payment within the time you've allotted, relist the tickets in another auction.

• If you're buying a ticket from Ticketmaster that you later plan to sell on eBay, consider asking that you get it through Ticketfast. With Ticketfast, you get a file in Adobe Acrobat ( .pdf ) format, which you can print and use as a ticket. If you get a Ticketfast ticket, you can email the Ticketfast file to the buyer, and delivery will be immediate and done.

• When shipping tickets, use a next-day delivery service such as Federal Express or UPS that enables you to track your shipment. That way, you will have a record that your ticket was received and the buyer cannot claim she never received it. You can also use the U.S. Postal Service for next -day delivery.