Buyer-initiated purchase cancellation leads to a dead end | Members help members

ben22946 · 2025-12-21T23:04:56.046000Z

Hello dear community,I’ve already searched a lot, but unfortunately haven’t found a satisfactory answer to the situation I’m currently in. I auctioned off a Christmas item on eBay. Unfortunately, it then wasn’t paid for. For three days the buyer simply didn’t respond. On the fourth day, as the seller, I could have canceled it with the reason “buyer has not paid,” which would probably also have resulted in some kind of sanction (?) against the delinquent buyer. The buyer presumably knew that and therefore, after a little over three days, finally showed some sign of life and asked for the purchase to be canceled. Since it’s almost Christmas now and my item won’t be sensibly sellable again until at least next year, I was not thrilled. As the seller, I then had the choice of agreeing to the cancellation or rejecting it. Unfortunately, you’re put in front of this choice without it ever really being fully explained anywhere what the consequences of this decision are. If you agree, then basically everything is probably undone, the item can be listed again, and the buyer suffers no disadvantage at all from having ruined the auction. I didn’t want that. So I clicked Reject. However, I’m also anything but happy with the consequences of this decision. The auction is still showing the status “Waiting for payment.” But I can certainly wait for payment until the cows come home. A cancellation due to non-payment is no longer possible because the cancellation process is already considered completed and there can’t be another one. And opening an eBay case, as used to be sensibly organized in the past, seems to have been abolished without an equivalent replacement. Conclusion: as a buyer, you can just buy or bid on something and then simply ask for cancellation afterward - no matter what the seller does, you get away scot-free. The seller is out of luck and the auction goes down in history as unpaid forever. That can’t really be right, can it?!I’d be grateful for any advice on how I can still get out of this situation.

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Buyer-initiated purchase cancellation leads to a dead end | Members help members | eBay Germany