Advice needed: Receiving payment with Paypal

[mdc2d]

Hello,

I just sold my wife's Conn 8D Horn on hornplayer.net. The buyer and I both have paypal accounts so we elected to use those for the payment. I am located in Tennessee,the buyer is in Nebraska. SO, how would you work getting payment and shipping the horn? Do I get payment before I ship? That would be a little weird for the buyer. Just want to be fair.

What do you guys do?

[Dan Schultz]

99% of the time I get payment before I ship. Only in very rare cases where I know the buyer personally will I ship before payment is made.

PayPal offers some degree of protection to both the seller and the buyer but it could take three months to resolve a dispute.

[Todd S. Malicoate]

Do I get payment before I ship? That would be a little weird for the buyer. Just want to be fair.

The fact that you asked a polite question about such a matter says volumes about your good character. Well done!

I've done quite a variety of eBay selling...my feedback is now near 1000. I view these sorts of transactions the same way as buying from an online retail store. In those instances, you wouldn't think twice about paying for an item before it is shipped. This really shouldn't be any different. PayPal is a very safe and reliable way to handle the transfer of money.

Good luck to you and my best wishes for a speedy and successful transaction!

[tokuno]

I think there's a surcharge for debit/credit card use (not quite sure - don't receive much money, sadly). Unless you're willing to absorb an almost 5% hit, either get a handshake that your buyer is paying via cash-in-account, or get a postal money order or the like.

As a buyer, I've been uncomfortable sending large sums person-to-person, so I've worked with the seller to establish legitimacy prior to emailing out the cash. They've been very understanding. Some of the things we've done:
1) email a digital photo of the seller holding the horn and today's newspaper. One guy took the picture in front of his house with the street address in the background for an additional layer of feel-good.
2) provide employer's HR contact (just to confirm employment, the same as a prospective employer would do)
3) one seller was unemployed and volunteered to give me the name of his pastor. I checked out his church online, verified the pastor's contact info, then called him and chatted a bit. A little brazen, perhaps, and hardly ironclad, but there was over a thousand dollars at stake, and it helped settle my butterflies.

Granted, if someone wanted to scam me, there's ways around all of these checks, but I figured it improved my odds of a successful transaction.

[cjk]

1) Get the money before you ship anything. Else, you may be out a horn.

2) Buyer should pay the paypal fees which will not be refundable. You should read the paypal agreements to figure out how much they're going to take. If the buyer uses a credit card, it's something like 3 to 5%. If payment comes out of a checking account, then I think there are minimal to no fees. There are different paypal account types which have different fee structures. You should go to the paypal site and figure out what kind you have and how much they will charge you.

3) You and the buyer should agree about any trial period and y'all should put that in writing. It should be very clear. Have a non-musician friend read it. If they understand it, it's probably good.

4) People are people, some are good and decent folks, some are not-so-good.
I don't think the fact that a person is a musician or a doctor or a soldier or a garbage man makes him (or her) any more or less good and decent. While some folks seem to think musicians are "good people" because they are musicians, it is my experience that specific vocations and hobbies do not automatically make people honest, good, or decent. My point is that you need to do whatever it takes to protect yourself.


--Christian

[Mojo workin']

Move to 'off topic'.