Today I had to file an Unpaid Item (known as a UPI) grievance with eBay. It’s not hard to do…you just have to tell eBay that you haven’t received your payment and they will send a note out to the buyer on your behalf.
In this case, a book sold on August 27 and of course I sent an invoice right away. I always tell my students that I try to be patient with customers—you just never know what’s going on in their lives (maybe something terrible happened and they haven’t had time to get on their computer), so I try to give them benefit of the doubt. I sent another invoice on September 7 with a gentle reminder attached: Second Invoice.
So here we are one more week later and I still haven’t seen the money. So I am having eBay deal with him. Now that I’ve filed a UPI, every time he opens up eBay he will see a pop-up note asking about payment. In 4 days it will automatically end the dispute, and depending on if he pays or not, a record could be put on his file.
When I went into the UPI section of eBay, it offered to do this automatically for me. I just chose the number of days I am willing to wait for payment (I chose 16; other options are 4, 8, 24, and 32 days). So if eBay sees that my item has not been paid for, it will automatically start sending notes to the buyer. That’s a time-saver for me…and I won’t have to figure backwards to see if it’s been two weeks yet….
Previous experience has shown that sometimes all it takes for payment to be made is a little nudge from eBay. So, I wonder if I’ll be seeing my $13.98 soon….
