Cancelling An eBay Order - Never, Never, Never Choose Out of Stock
What happens if you have to cancel an order? It happens. Perhaps when you go to ship your item you notice that there is a flaw that you hadn't seen before. Perhaps you misplaced the item. Perhaps your toddler attempted to start his art career using your item as his canvas. Perhaps you are out of stock. eBay sellers are not perfect. These things happen. If you haven't already, you will eventually have to cancel an order for some reason or another. I'm here to tell you never, never, never, choose out of stock when you cancel an order. Never. Always select "customer requested cancellation" and email the buyer separately that the item is no longer available along with an apology. If worst comes to worst, they will deny the cancellation but you still won't get a defect. Most will not care what reason you selected as long as you explain that you need to cancel the transaction. I generally email them and ask if they want to wait for an item to come in or do they prefer to cancel. If they say cancel, I can honestly choose the customer requested cancellation without choosing out of stock. I rarely have this problem, but when I do, I do not want a defect against my account. Let me insert right here that I am not advocating to use this is you have poor business practices. If you misplace items over and over or have duplicate listings and you only have one item. You need to stop right now and figure out how to run a better business. This eBay policy was put into place to weed out the bad sellers. I agree that there needed to be something done, but I also think that a seller should not be punished for a mistake here and there. We are all human. Even big companies make mistakes. The reason you don't want to choose out of stock is because in 2014 eBay introduced the new Defect Rating System in order to keep seller's performance levels high. eBay is concentrating on how satisfied your buyer is, how fast you shipped an item (tracking uploaded on time and validated), and if you have closed cases without resolution. If you get too many of these issues, your account falls into the Below Standard Status and you get restrictions placed on your account.
