You bring up a great point about requiring immediate payment on your Buy It Now items. This is a great way to make sure that you do not have any non-paying bidders and would definitely work if you are selling tickets.

The downside of requiring immediate payment is that you do not have the opportunity to offer combined shipping. This may not be a problem if you are selling something where someone will not purchase more than one item from you, or if you do not offer combined shipping.

We have never employed this strategy as we have always sold items in which we combine shipping, in the hopes that people will buy more than one from us. This has worked well for us, in that we could offer combined shipping.

However, we have also had to deal with people that take their time paying. We have a 3-day payment policy, but eBay won’t let you do anything until after 7 days have passed.

We have been lucky in that only a very small percentage of our buyers end up not paying. It is a pain having to chase down people for payments, though. We do suggest using the immediate payment option if that will work for the items that you are selling.

99.9% of our listing are fixed price and immediate payment (to avoid non paying bidders, and also generates hgher profits for us.) If we are getting close to game time and change the listing to best offer – the offer are ridiculous! It’s not uncommon for someone to offer $5 for a $200 pair of tickets! After shipping and fees, we lose more than of we just let the tickets go unsold.

Even when we don’t pur best offer in the listing – we get lowball offers.

If buyer make a respectful and reasonable offer – we usually accept it. If they’re offer is insulting or unreasonable, we just block them.

We are fortunate to have other sites we can market our product on as well that generate higher selling prices.

Jessica