What do you do when the winner of the item that you auctioned on eBay did not make the payment? I had tried sending mails to that person but there was no response. I had asked some people on what I need to do under this circumstances, nobody could give me a straight answer.

I had an option of digging through eBay for the answer but I simply hate reading TOS, Manuals and anything similar to those. So, I sent another mail to that person and still there was no response. So, I am assuming that the person could be already dead, or have met with a bad accident and therefore, unable to read and reply to his or her mail. Well, I could only limit to these assumptions as no one would do such a thing on purpose or simply bidding with a bad intention or something…

Running out of what else to do, I logged in to eBay and this time I noticed the Live Help jsut below the main menu on the top right hand corner of the screen. I decided to give that a try and I was put on hold since there was 10 callers / chatters ahead of me. The good thing was that the queue was being updated in real time and you could see how many people left before you can start your chat.

After a few minutes, I got the message to send in my question and I sent them the problem that I am having with the bid winner. All the support person needed was the item number.

From the conversation with the support person, who was really helpful by the way, I was told that if the payment is not receievd after 7 days from the closing date of the auction, I can report an unpaid item via the Dispute Console. This can be accessed via My eBay –> Accounts –> Dispute Console.

After lodging my report, eBay will try to contact the person and if there is still no payment after 7 days of lodging the report then my selling fee will be refunded, I can relist the item for free and the person will get a strike under his or her account, which will affect his or her next bidding.

A few more days left and too bad if the person failed to settle this matter with me.  Now, I know more about doing stuffs on eBay!