Paypal is the easiest way to scam on Ebay. If you are a buyer on Ebay you are fine, but once you start selling with Paypal, you might as well bend over. Personally the worst thing that Ebay ever did was buy Paypal. Now that everyone's brother, mom, and grandma are on Ebay, it is ridiculous.
Not really true. I've been selling on eBay for 10 years and using PayPal since before eBay bought them and I've not had a single problem. Have also never had a problem trading domains on forums with PP either. There have been situations where I realized I was being scammed but easily avoided it. Gotta use that head and the gut.
I know some have had problems with PP - there are of course many horror stories - but I think bad judgement factors into LOTS of it. If unsure, make a phonecall. If the transaction is over a certain amount ask for Escrow and observe their reaction. Research the buyer (not just their feedback). If anything seems too "off" just don't transact. Etc.
Or maybe I have just been one of the lucky ones, who knows.
I do love and prefer MoneyBookers by the way, though.
And... I finally just made my first BQB purchases..
As a buyer, Paypal is GREAT. As a seller however, exercising proper judgement is a must, as you've suggested below.
I had listed a few domains for sale recently accepting paypal as a payment method -- I wasn't expecting the same person to buy all the domains which amounted to over $3000. I voiced my concerns with the buyer and he happily agreed to pay by escrow. Other than someone who badly needs money in a hurry I really can't see many legitimate reasons for refusing to proceed through escrow provided the seller is willing to pay the escrow fee.
Congrats on your purchase
I've done a bit of maintenance on BQB -- the pages should load a bit faster now.
1 - Someone could have hacked the buyer's account in which case the buyer will get a full refund and you will be out all your money.
2 - For whatever reason an honest buyer could decide to not be so honest anymore -- we saw this a few times in the LLLL.com scam thread. Perhaps they were planning on scamming people from the start and only did a number of transactions honestly to encourage false trust in their credibility.
a) Scammer claims his account was hacked. End result: Same as #1
b) Scammer claims he never received the domain name. End result: Paypal asks you to provide proof of shipping (a tracking number). You'll be unable to do this unless you snail mailed the buyer a contract to sign. If you didn't do that, you'll find your case closed, your money returned to the buyer, and yourself out whatever you rightfully should have received.
It's certainly up for debate whether Moneybookers encourages sellers to be scammers but it really isn't even debatable that accepting Paypal considerably increases your risk of being scammed.
Hi Lorenzo, I should hopefully have that implemented by the end of July. Emails are sent out at present (was part of the flurry of updates a couple weeks back) when a bidder is outbid.
The bulk listing software has been fully developed and is now being tested. Should hopefully have it available within a week -- still trying to work out how best to set it up to make sure the feature doesn't get abused (eg. we don't want anyone listing 10,000 domains at $10,000 per because they have a few domains worth that and are too lazy to go through their list and set individual prices).
Have hired a server administrator to optimize BQB and make sure BQB is ready for the considerable load that'll be placed on it once the bulk listing software is uploaded.
Have an Adwords campaign now running for BQB in addition to the advertising on Namepros. New members being referred from Namepros has largely slowed down -- I would imagine most domainers have seen the ad on Namepros enough times to have clicked it by now if they were interested.
Adwords is getting BQB 2-3 new quality members per day. With title and text "Serious Domainers Only" and mentioning that use of BQB is "subject to membership approval" seems to be doing a pretty good job at keeping my costs/clicks down and quality up -- 944000 impressions so far at $0.30 CPM. I can't complain!
Excellent to hear Reece. I think the AdWorlds campaign is a great idea. As long as BQB membership is mainly NamePros only I don't really see it going too far forward. I say this because most people would just list a domain they really want to sell on NP knowing it will probably attract more visitors compared to at BQB where there will only be some NP members view the listing. However if there are quite a few non NP members at BQB I think it could move forwards in leaps & bounds.
Many people have been listing their domains on BQB after they have failed to find buyers on Namepros -- quite predictably, they usually fail to sell on BQB as well because the buyer base on BQB is currently a subset of the Namepros buyer base.
Lots of domainers for one reason or another choose not to participate on domain name forums -- that's one major group I have to look into reaching.
The one thing I want to keep going for BQB is the sense of trust, much like we have at Namepros that we can deal with someone without worrying about getting scammed. After the bulk listing software is uploaded, the first priority will be to implement a "Verified Buyer Only" feature which sellers can choose to implement on their auctions free of charge if they wish to reduce any increase in risk extending to non-Namepros members may bring.
Once the appropriate security measure are in place, I'd like to open BQB to potential endusers and novice domainers who don't currently qualify for BQB membership. So far only 366 out of 449 applications have been approved, so that's a lot of potential members I've missed out on solely to make sure the likelihood of anyone getting scammed is very low. I'm sure 90% of those members I turned down are honest but I just don't have the measures in place to accept the risk that other 10% might bring. So far only 1 scammer has been stupid enough to put the same first + last name in his application that he's used to scam elsewhere -- like I'm not going to google that up before approving people!
The auction for PCLF.COM went without a sale. The max bid I got was $305. And the reserve was only $310. If there were such a feature, I would most probably tell the bidder about it and the domain might have sold out then.
I'm sorry to hear that Sufyan. Until I get something implemented, the best strategy is to keep reserves underneath round numbers.
eg. Someone will often place a bid of $100, $200, $300, but not $310 or $320. Most bids that have been placed so far fall into either in $X00 or $X50. Keeping your reserve to $X99 or $X49 will likely greatly reduce the odds of missing your reserve should you have a very interested buyer.
Last edited by Reece : 07-11-2008 at 08:35 AM.
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