posted on April 2, 2001 04:40:33 AM
I bet this has happened to almost everyone in here, and I'd be interested to know how the rest of you deal with it. You make a sale and a few days or a week later you get an envelope in the mail. Inside is a check or cash or money order but no hint as to what item this person bought. No note, no item number or description--just the payment. You have three or four hundred closed auctions and there is no way in the world to figure out what this person is paying for. MAYBE if you're lucky the name on the return address (if there even is one and you can make it out) will be close to the buyer's email, and if you scroll through all of your closed auctions that correspond to that amount you can eventually figure it out, after wasting half a day. But more often not the buyer has some generic user name/email and you have absolutely nothing to go on. How do you figure out what this person is paying for? Do you just wait until they contact you and ask where is my item?
posted on April 2, 2001 05:01:26 AM
This happens to me at 3 or 4 times a week. And it CAN be a nightmare.
I usually start by doing a search on the last and first names (in that order) on the items in my "kept" mail folder. This is the folder where I archive all of my messages received from customers. With any luck, they will have emailed with their address to me before sending their payment. Most are identified this way.
If that doesn't work, I search for them on a a couple of the "people directory" sites hoping to find an email address or phone number for them.
If that doesn't work, I send an email to [email protected] explaining the situation. If I get the right rep at ebay, she'll send me the user ID of the bidder and (sometimes) the item #(s) of the transactions. Sometimes a rep will reply that ebay can't give out a user's info, even to the seller! His suggestion is always to pull the bidders's user info and CALL them. Well, duh! If I had the bidder's user info, I wouldn't need ebaY's help. When this happens I just make the same request again. Usually on the 2nd or 3rd try I get a rep that has a clue and they'll send me the info. I hope this helps.
posted on April 2, 2001 05:08:22 AM
I have found that in 99.9% of these cases, the person previously sent an email with their Name and Address. We print all correspondence and place it with the item on our "pending" shelves. This makes it very easy to match the name and address to their item.
posted on April 2, 2001 05:13:27 AM
Plus:
After the auction ended they never even contacted you with there name and address!
so now even if you have the time to check threw all your auction, you can't even match the name and address.
What I do is I put it on the side and when I have time I check the amount that was sent
with the total price due, sometimes it matches that's if the buyer didn't decide to not have ins. and the total sent is different then your original EOA Quote.
This has happened so many times, I know exactly what you mean.
What I would like to know is, how could someone just put a payment in an envelope and send it with no ID as to what it is for.
I wounder sometimes if this is how they pay all there bills,
If you exhaust all ways of identifing this payment, you may have to just wait till they contact you, that's if they remember that they bought something from you. If it is a check or money order I would make a photocopy of it and then deposit it, and wait, because when the buyer does contact you, just explain what had happened and then you could send there item out right away since the check has cleared already.
posted on April 2, 2001 05:55:06 AM
On occasion this happens to me. When it does, this is what I do. I simply put the the payment back in it's envelope and place it "on the back burner". I take care of the people who have been kind enough or bright enough to include the appropriate shipping information.
After I get this work done, and if I'm not too tired and have some time left, I might dig out their envelope and try to figure out what item this brainiac might own. I might try to cross reference their email as some else mentioned. Or I might check the envelope for a return address. But I don't waste my time trying to figure out who they are.
The very first time this happened to me, I treated it like a test question in college. Don't waste precious time on a question that is too diffucult to answer. Simply skip the question and go on to other one that will be less diffucult to answer. This method is a great way to better manage your time.
If all else fails, you can wait for the to email you.
posted on April 2, 2001 06:11:30 AM
Thanks for all the replies. I usually do try most of the suggestions here but it's amazing to me how often it happens. What kind of genius just sticks money in an envelope without any note and expects you to know what they bought? Like someone said, sometimes they don't even put a return address. Or else they DO enclose a note but it says something like "here is my payment for my Ebay auction." Like, duh, do they think you've only auctioned one item? I was just wondering if anyone else had any methods that don't involve hours of sleuthing--thanks for the timesensitive@ebay address. I didn't know that one.
posted on April 2, 2001 11:04:02 PM
I've managed to significantly decrease the number of "mystery payments" I recieve by including the following paragraph in my EOA email:
"For your convienience, there is an order form at the bottom of this email. Please include a completed copy of this form (either printed or hand-copied) with your payment."
Then at the bottom of the email I put a form that looks like this:
Book Title: Another Book About Something
Item #: 123456789
Before I started doing that, I got a LOT of mystery payments. Now I probably only get one or two a month.
With those that I do still get, I run a quick search through my email program for their name. If that doesn't turn up anything, I photocopy the payment and print a generic form letter that basically says "I'm not a mindreader, what the heck is this payment for?" and mail the photocopy and letter to the address on the envelope or check. 99% of the time they email me right away with an appology and the item number.
posted on April 3, 2001 12:11:25 AM
I start with the dollar amount and try to match it that way ~ never thought of the search by name, thanks for the tip. A few times I have had to wait for all the other auctions with the same dollars amount to pay so that I could narrow the search, but most times I am able to match the name if there are several auctions with the same amount.
posted on April 3, 2001 12:25:26 AM
As a small time seller I don't have this problem much. But rather than spend too much time on it, I think I would just spend the 20 cents and send a postcard to the return address saying "Hey! E-mail me if you want your stuff."
posted on April 4, 2001 04:13:35 AM
.... then there's the ones that *do* include the item number, but the numbers are getting sooooooo long, they manage to drop a digit, or change a digit, or transpose .... and that's about as good as not even having an item # enclosed.
Marcia in Ohio
[email protected]
