Deadbeats on eBay

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If the noise level on the chat boards is anything to go by, the issue of deadbeats on eBay (both buyers and sellers) is a growing problem. People will bid on items that they have no intention of paying for. People sell items and never ship them after collecting payment. People win bids, then crank out a list of excuses as to why they can't pay. Certainly emergencies happen, people die, and so on. However, from a cold-hearted perspective, the world continues to turn regardless, and debts and obligations must be met despite any tragedies in life. When my father died, I doubt that my apartment complex would have let me skip a month's rent, for example.

I have a few ideas on how to stem this problem. Nothing, IMHO, will ever eliminate it. People, and the institutions they create, are imperfect and always will be. However, I believe that implementing my ideas will go a long way to reducing the amuount of fraud and financial irresponsibility that we find on eBay.

My cool Idea	Why it's so cool
Register with Big Brother	All eBayers must register with a credit card. Whether you are a buyer or seller, you must provide a valid credit card number to eBay. In this way, you partly establish that you are somewhat fiscally sound. If you default on a bid and get an NPB (or maybe a sell, if it can be proved), your credit card will be charged. If the credit card fails, you are kicked off eBay.
Pay the piper	All new members will have their credit cards charged $40.00. This will ensure that your card is valid and will help pay for all of these new ideas. Many people will balk at this, claiming that this is an outrageous fee to charge people, and that all should be free, etc. I disagree. These safeguards will cost money, and this is the only way to pay for them. Think of this as a one-shot lifetime membership fee. For the low, low price of $40.00, you can buy and sell on eBay forever as long as you're a good eBayer (or until the economy collapses, anyway).
The check is in the mail	After you give your contact information, eBay would snail-mail you a secret password, which you would have to enter to continue with the signup process. This would ensure that your info is valid. This would also delay entry onto eBay (newbies could no longer sign up and bid on items that same day), but I believe it would be well worth it.
This is only a test	Once the snail-mail password is entered and confirm, we can enter the final phase of membership. This would be a combination test and tutorial. You would go through a series of web pages that teach you about eBay, the bidding process, and impressing on you that bids and auctions are binding agreements and that you really (really, really, really) are expected to pay for auctions that you win and that you had better be prepared to pay for ANY AND ALL bids. The tutorial would be set up so that you couldn't just run through it by pressing an OK button over and over again. Each page would have several questions, with a set of radio buttons for answers. The defaults would never be on the correct choice. Unless you answer all questions correctly, you could not advance to the next page. You would therefore have to thoroughly read and understand each page. This would not guarantee that only responsible people got through, but it would help out a lot.
The hits just keep on comin'	Normally, if a troll or spammer gets on eBay, does bad stuff and gets kicked off, he can keep coming back with new e-mail addresses. Under this system, he could still do that, but would get dinged $40.00 each time. It's my opinion that eventually those people would get tired of paying the registration fee over and over. A variant of this would be that if a person is suspended or kicked off, their e-mail address AND their credit card number would be put on a temporary banned list (perhaps for six months), so that our erstwhile troll would soon run out of credit card numbers. Here are some harsher alternatives. If a troll tries to get back on using a suspended credit card, he would have to pay a $40.00 premium on top of the original $40.00 fee. Even worse, dings could be incremented, and each time you would have to pay yet another $40.00, so that if you've been kicked off or suspended with the same credit card five times, you would have to pay $200.00 to get back in, for a grand total of $600.00 in registration fees. "Ouch!" says the troll, and soon goes away. You could also do an exponential or logarithmic count, but such fees would soon exceed the national debt, and even a right-wing conservative like me believes that such a course of action would be just a tad excessive.
Battle of the NPB's	eBay should do a better job examining and reacting to NPB's. Each time a person bids on an item and refuses to pay, the whole system suffers, along with the good people who really want to engage in commerce. If a bidder refuses to pay, his credit card should be charged and he should be suspended, if the situation warrants it. Each case is different, but in my opinion, eBay has become far too lax in this regard. It's a little harder to take action against what I call Non-Providing-Sellers, since it's hard to prove either way that a package was or was not sent. The only solution I can see is to require all shipments to have some sort of tracking id. Of course, this will prove only that a package was sent. It cannot prove what was in the package or the quality of the merchandise.

While nothing will ever completely eliminate bad bidders and sellers, and trolls and spammers who clog up the chat boards with porn and other disgusting things, I believe that these initiatives will go a long way towards reducing such problems, and make eBay a far happier place to be.