The 7 Biggest eBay Scams - How Sellers Avoid Them

alright so in this video I want to cover the top 7 biggest scams that I see buyers using against sellers on eBay and how you can avoid them as a seller now in general I don't like to talk about these kinds of topics or make videos about them because scams actually happen very rarely on eBay are their bed sellers out there and buyers out there absolutely so we do want to mitigate our risk as much as possible which is why I've put together this list of seven of the biggest scams for you to avoid I do have one other bonus one I made it a bonus one I'll put at the end because I know a lot of you are going to disagree with me on that one and that's why I kind of put it at the end but let's get into the first one any but guys if you want to follow along with me I will have a free pdf down below where you can follow along and that gives you all the details about these seven scams alright so I kind of put these in order through

the whole transaction process so the first one is when you receive an offer that is for more than you have the item listed for so anytime you have an item that has a good tool cancelled set price so in other words it's not an auction listing sometimes you might set it up so that buyers can give you offers on that item and if someone offers you a price that is more than the price you have it listed for that is a huge red flag and I would actually decline the offer and just ignore that sell or block them if you can and the reason for that is because I promise you that if you accept the offer it was either one a mistake which sometimes happens or they're going to message you and say hey I sent my payment even though they didn't or they're going to try to do the transaction outside of eBay which we'll talk about later or they're going to send you what's called a check and then the e check won't clear so just

refuse them if it sounds too good to be true it is but let's move on to scam number two which I just kind of alluded to which is the a check so when people pay for their items through PayPal one of the options is that they can send you what's called an e-check now the thing about each EX is you don't get your money right away you have to wait for the cheque to actually clear for the money to show up in your account on PayPal so do not ship out the item until the check clears and you will get an email letting you know that the e check has cleared you'll get that email from PayPal so and actually eBay makes this easy for you because they won't even put the item in the awaiting shipment section of your eBay account until that check clears so unless it appears in that portion where it says awaiting shipment or that section don't

ship out the item you always want to make sure that those checks clear out first and while we're talking about this let me just throw in this other bonus one because I just kind of mentioned it a second go and actually wasn't one of my seven bonuses and that's never accept a payment outside of eBay so sometimes buyers were message to you and say hey I want to buy this item but can I send you the payment directly not use eBay don't do that not only does it violate eBay's terms and conditions it might get you kicked off but there's a good chance that there's gonna be some scam happening where you end up sending the item and then they get the money back somehow which totally is possible the safest thing is to go through eBay and PayPal if that's what you're using but let's move on to the third scam that I see people doing and that is when buyers ask you to ship the item to a different address than the one that's on the order so they might say hey I know these order is supposed to ship to New York can you ship it to my home in Kentucky don't do that eBay and PayPal will only protect you if you ship to the address that was on file when they purchased the item that's it never ship to another address even if it's a little bit different I always tell them they have to cancel the order and replace it is that a pain yes do the buyer sometimes get mad yes do they sometimes leave me negative feedback for that yes but if they do I always get it removed because eBay knows that's their policy and they can't leave you negative feedback for that so that's the third scam and the reason that's a scam is because if they end up shipping it if you to the different address they can then claim that you didn't ship it to the correct address and then they end up getting a refund and they get to keep the item so that kind of brings me to the fourth scam is when the buyer claims that they never received the item even when they did and again if this happens then they can not only keep the item but they get a refund as well so how do you prevent that from happening because this is probably the number one scam that I see happening on eBay the number one thing that I see buyers trying to do to get money out of me and the best way to prevent this is just upload your tracking numbers it's super-easy upload your tracking number for all your orders and make sure it's a valid carrier that way it registers with eBay now the other thing I'll say is that you want to be careful with any item that's over seven hundred and fifty dollars because for eBay requires you to have signature confirmation of the delivery now if you are ship the item out yourself if you have it in stock and shipping out yourself you have control over that you can tell your carrier to require a signature but if your drop

shipping it if you don't have control over it then you want to be careful there I've definitely sold items that have been over one to close to three thousand dollars before but I'm you know it's a tricky you know you got to be careful there because anything over $750 if there's no signature you know you're in a tough spot so just be aware of that as well and that brings me to the item not received cases that buyer sometimes open and this is where the buyer is claiming that they never received the item they actually open up a case for it and the only way you're going to win that case is if you have the tracking number uploaded either directly inside the case or for the order itself ideally in both places now if you have that tracking number if it's valid with a valid carrier it shows it was delivered and delivered to the buyers address the address on file when they purchased the item you will win these cases so don't worry about that

just get those tracking numbers uploaded it's the easiest thing that you can do to avoid being scammed as a seller on eBay so the fifth scam I want to talk about here is when a buyer claims that the item was not as described or otherwise wants to return the item and tries to scam you during the return process now even if you don't offer free returns for your items buyers can still get free returns if they claim the item is not as described now if you're a drop shipper like what I do generally you don't care because the one who's going to front the cost of the return is your supplier not you because they were ultimately responsible for making sure that the item was to correct one and they didn't do that but if you are not a drop shipper and you ship this out yourself then you probably have a good idea of whether you shipped out the right item or not so what happens is if you get the item back and there's something wrong with it let's say they

damaged it you can actually deduct that you don't have to give them a full refund for the item so that kind of mitigates some of the costs right there some of the problems with that now in an extreme case where you shift the item out to a customer and this is generally for people who do like retail arbitrage not drop shipping and the buy returns a different item that is clearly right a scam so what do you do then that's when you want to call the bay you don't want to go inside the return and say there's a button there that says you know help us have eBay step in and help you with this don't do that actually call eBay directly first and explain to them take pictures document everything if you just click that button a lot of times there's not enough information in there and you might lose it the case you don't want to get there so call them up if you receive back for a return that completely raw item all right let's talk about scam number six let's say everything goes great the person gets the item they

never complain about it they never open up a return but instead what happens is maybe a month later a couple weeks later they open up a dispute with their credit-card company it's called a charge back what do you do that because I guarantee you these credit-card companies you are not their customer is the person who purchased the item and they want to make that customer happy so what do they always side with the customer which means that they are going to get their money back which means it's going to come out of your pocket except it doesn't always because you're using PayPal and PayPal despite what a lot of people say about PayPal I have found them to be awesome because whenever there's a chargeback I'd say at least 80% of the time usually more as long as I have a valid tracking number that's been uploaded and shows it was delivered to the buyers correct address then even if we lose the charge back PayPal still doesn't take the money out of my account they cover the cost of the item 80% plus they take care of it so that's why one of the reasons I really love PayPal a lot of other companies wouldn't do that for you but they do so charge backs are an issue for you if you're scared of that just make sure that you're using PayPal which as of the making of this video PayPal is still the primary way that most people buy items on eBay the seventh one and the final one before we get to the bonus is feedback extortion this is when a buyer purchases an item and then messages you and says hey you know this item there's something wrong with it and unless you give me a partial refund I am going to leave you negative feedback anytime they ask for money in exchange for not leaving negative feedback that is feedback extortion and it is not allowed on eBay tell them you will not do that maybe you

want to tell them that you would accept a return of the item but they have to ship it back first if they leave you negative feedback anyway call up eBay and you'll get it removed I guarantee if you find the right representative and if it's clear feedback extortion all the reps should remove that negative feedback so those are my seven most common scams that I see buyers using against sellers but I do have one more kind of topic that I know a lot of you are not going to completely agree with me on but if so far you've agreed with me on everything or you found this helpful at all please give the video a thumbs up and leave a comment down below letting me know about any other scams that I might have missed or any of these that you found particularly helpful the more comments and the more of the thumbs up this video gets the more this video will get out there in front of people's eyes more accelerate ends the scams by buyers and ultimately that's what we're trying to do help each other out as seller so

any gums up and comment down below is really going to help with that the last category I want to talk about here is the global shipping program scams I guess you can call it if you're not familiar with the global shipping program that's basically when I sell an item let's say it's this remote control and it's sold to an item over sold to a customer overseas in another country through eBay's global shipping program all I have to do is ship this item to eBay's facility in Kentucky then eBay forwards this item to the customer overseas I don't have to worry about international shipping it makes it so easy for us sellers to sell internationally now a lot of people think there's a lot of scams around the global shipping program or GSP as it's called for short and they understand why I mean just imagine this if this item let's say they ordered this item and I ship them this one I shipped them the

wrong item so now I'm responsible for paying to ship that item back to me and that can cost a lot of money if it's international and you know there's some extortion that can kind of happen there because if someone's threatening to have you pay like 100 bucks to ship this back and they're only asking for a $20 partial refund like it makes sense just to leave the partial refund but you know that they're scamming you so you don't want to do that but here's the thing the global shipping program has a lot of protections built into it that's the way eBay designed it because they want you to use it they really so for instance if I deliver this item to Kentucky eBay's facility in Kentucky as long as I get it delivered there I'm pretty much off the hook at that point if eBay then forwards it to the customer and it gets damaged in route then eBay is responsible for the damage not me so we've had items that have arrived overseas damaged and eBay has always

covered the cost because we are able to show that UPS delivered the item and they reported no damage because anytime there's damage FedEx and UPS will report it but they didn't which proves that it was delivered successfully to EBA and EBA is the one or their carrier was the one who damaged it along the way even in cases where the customers claiming item not as described we've still been able to have those clothes out in our favor because of disclaimers we've had inside our description we put disclaimers in there about electronic products letting customers know hey if you buy this product and you live overseas there's no guarantee that this electronic product is going to work in your home country you're buying it at your own risk we are not going to be responsible to ship it back you would have yourself I've had buyers buy these electronic items and complain to us that they don't work but

we've always won those cases because we have that disclaimer inside of our listing so the last two points I'll make about this is one make sure you use a reputable supplier if you are drop shipping that way you know that the correct item is always being sent out and the second thing that I'll say is if you are still worried about this consider using a global shipping program but only selling cheaper items that way if you do have to eat a loss it's not going to be a ton but overall I really think global shipping program is great and I think if you use it right there's a lot of protections built-in alright guys so there you go those are my seven biggest scams that I see people using on eBay to scam sellers such as ourselves and I threw in that little bonus about the global shipping program and that other bonus about never accepting payments outside of eBay so if you guys got any good value out of that I'd appreciate if you gave the video a thumbs up and left a comment down below letting me know that way this video gets in front of more people and of course subscribe to the channel if you haven't done so already and hopefully I'll see you guys in the next video bye for now