Blocking Buyers

It's common on the ebay boards to threaten to block buyers who seem ungrateful regarding seller performance.

This is largely, but not entirely unreasonable.

Most dings are the result of some seller behavior which seller should in fact change.

Many sellers fail to evaluate the blocking equation properly.

Here's the two truths:
1. Blocking a random buyer will have no effect on anything
2. Blocking a buyer who has bought seller's stuff before will cost a seller money.

The latter presumes that the stuff seller seller sells is useful in qty more than one. If not, blocking a buyer will have no effect on anything.

Buyers tend to buy in category - time spurts. That is, a buyer will be looking for some class of cutters for a week or a season, and then, not so much. The buyer moves on to some other category, or comes and goes with respect to ebay as a whole.

Sellers, on the other hand, tend to be much more stable. They sell the same kind of stuff until it's not working any more. Particularly with respect to auctions, these sellers are, at any point in time, probably dependent on 2-5 buyers who are interested and qualified to set the final price of the stuff. Block one of them, and the final value goes down. Block two of them, and the final value might now be set by what could have been the 4th place bidder. Real money.

That doesn't meant that some buyers should not be blocked. It is quite possible for a buyer to cost a seller far more money than the final value on an item or so per week. The buyers which should be blocked are chronic bad feedback reporters. Watch out for:
1. A history of soft positives, >10% left.
2. A history of neg/neut in almost any quantity which were replied to by what appears to have been a seller who had done all the right things. I do not count "out of stock" negs as indicating a cranky buyer.
3. An across the board star ding.

These indicate a buyer which is leaving imprecise negative feedback, something a seller cannot much avoid other than by declining this buyer's business.

Seller must be very alert to the clues of isolated low stars. Whatever that was about, it will probably reappear if not fixed. The solution is to fix the problem, not to block this buyer.

Most common:

1. Ambiguous listing allowed buyer to form an incorrect impression.
2. High shipping charges.