I got some great feedback from paid subscribers on the Scam Buyer Lessons Learned series, the latest installment of which went up yesterday and covered a very recent attempt of a buyer to claim non-delivery on a $400 order.
Dealing with fraudulent or “scammer” buyers for any local game store that has e-commerce activity is an everyday reality. The law of large numbers does apply, thankfully. Once a store is shipping hundreds of daily orders through whatever combination of TCGplayer, eBay, Amazon, and web fulfillment that store uses, the problem rate can usually be wrangled down into the low single digit percentages through iterative process. That iterative process is expensive, though. Often the only way to learn how and why a process has to be used, is to lose a raft of money to being scammed on an order because of the lack or deficiency of that process.
I have plenty more great articles in the Scam Buyers series ahead, and in general those are going to be paid-exclusive because I’m just gonna say it bluntly, it cost me a lot more than $7.77 to learn the lesson in each of those articles. So the price of entry is a rounding error against that, and should be “worth it” many times over for anyone owning or operating a store.
I do recognize that recreational readers here at LGSNI are going to be kind of shut out of the content as a result of that. This is not an intended consequence but I don’t really know any way around it while still maintaining the articles as a value offering. I guess if my unfinished tale lede doesn’t lure you in for a look, you’ll just always wonder what happened. Not every SBLL article ends in victory for me. In fact, as the article catalog fills in over time, most of them won’t. But every scam buyer experience ended in me learning something, even if that something was just a refinement of the overall concepts I already knew. And like Joey Knish, I am showing you the playbook I put together off my own beats.
Today’s Monday Meditation is calibration. To hear me talk about all the scam buyers would naturally lead many readers to assume they are constantly happening, or that every disputed transaction leads to a dig-in-the-heels legal battle. That is not the case. It would be horrendously cost-inefficient to do business that way. Some small amount of loss is baked in to the overall store overhead, and the main thing upon such encounters is to prevent a small or negligible loss from growing larger, whether through additional labor or by letting the scammer have a second try.
The archetypical example of daily fraud handling is on TCGplayer where you get a damage claim, condition claim, or non-receipt claim on an order of a few dollars. Don’t even give it a moment’s thought. Block the buyer, refund the order, and move on. Any amount of attention you put on that dispute is losing you more dollars in the labor value of your personal time and attention than the total value of the order you’re refunding. Recognize what’s happening. You’ve encountered a bad buyer, who is bad for whatever reason and it doesn’t even matter so you’re not imposing judgment here. For the price of a few dollars, they won’t be doing business with you again and costing you even more. It is the least-worst option and is the only mathematically correct way to proceed.
Sometimes the buyer gets a bit more ambitious, making such a claim on an order that is for more than a few dollars, enough that the store cannot instantly shrug and keep walking. Take this unfortunate example, with a zero-star eBay account that tells us they are either a complete greenhorn who genuinely knows nothing about eBay purchasing, or they are a hard-bitten criminal who has already lost their eBay account before and this is their latest burner account:
Sad story, right? So what can the store do? If it was a tracked delivery, uploading tracking into the dispute dialog panel is usually enough for eBay. For a congruent dispute with TCGplayer, it’s even easier, just be unfailingly polite to the buyer and tell them you’re sorry they are experiencing this difficulty, and that you will reach out to TCG support for next steps, and then escalate it, and they will take care of it. In both cases, block this buyer.
I want to reiterate that. In both cases, block the buyer.
If the buyer is a seasoned scammer, it forces them to go an extra step to attempt to scam you again (opening yet another burner account), and speed bumps are generally pretty good protection in the “security through obscurity” sense of this business.
If the buyer is just an uninformed newbie, well, there’s obviously either a problem with their address or they are the unfortunate target of thieves or porch pirates, and while that is a shame, it is not your problem, so you are not obligated to incur the expense to get their situation sorted out. Simple as.
If you’re selling via Amazon, you cannot block buyers. For this reason, I caution LGS sellers heavily regarding Amazon. The third-party seller (you) incurs every cost. And publishers keep putting up more and more gates to cut off your access to product listings in the first place. The flip side, of course, is that Amazon has (for now) the largest e-commerce audience. An entire generation of consumers has been trained to tap-tap-drone as their low-friction purchasing behavior of choice. And you should be able to charge somewhat more on Amazon than on other platforms, though it often doesn’t feel like you can. The bottom line is if you are going to sling on Amazon, you need to go full-bore, and let volume wash away the problems.
The second most common dispute you get is someone trying to shake you down for a few bucks on a claim of the item being damaged or in worse condition than you listed it for. This is the result of scumbag information being shared in the TCG subreddits and discord groups that give buyers the game plan for this scam. Here is a typical claim, and notice this is for a sealed starter deck so it has no aftermarket value and will get opened to be used, so incidental wear on the outer corner is well-nigh completely irrelevant, this buyer is literally just fishing for your money:
To beat these claims, you offer the full refund upon return of the item, and tell them partial refunds are not available. As you can see, this guy has run into that reply before and he wasn’t happy about it. That’s because it worked. I never had to give this buyer any money back; he disappeared once I made it clear he wasn’t getting a partial refund no matter what. And yes, I blocked him from buying again.
TCGplayer in particular, and eBay sometimes, and Amazon once in a great while, will protect you if you escalate a case where the buyer has threatened negative feedback against their demand. It’s supposed to be against the terms of service. Enforcement of this is pretty consistent for TCGplayer and inconsistent everywhere else, but escalating these cases is a quick and easy option in your toolbox.
Incidentally, save yourself some trouble preemptively by blocking severe lowballers outright:
If any buyer message ever makes reference to returning the item for any reason, block the buyer and cancel their order. It’s a hassle just waiting to happen. Experienced online dealers know, this sort of buyer inquiry is what poker players refer to as a “tell”:
I’ll also tend to block any dealer who creates an interaction. Smart dealers (often buying via straw accounts so you can’t tell they are dealers) want to take advantage of your product dumping without you noticing, so they’re quiet and they don’t complain. That kind, you do want to deal with. The kind of dealers who create problems for you are usually telegraphing that by expecting special treatment, and are invariably backpack/garage dealers rather than legitimate stores. Some examples:
Or this guy:
I will also generally block people who have delivery time complaints that show they are not paying attention to the world around them, because they are sure to be back with yet another complaint soon enough:
Once you’ve blocked a problem buyer or lowballer they sometimes realize it and it really feels great to know that they actually experienced the consequences of their own actions for once. Not all of them do realize what happened, but most do:
That’s about enough for today. Like I said, the point of today’s Monday Meditation is calibration. With the Scam Buyer articles diving deep into high-stakes disputes with varying outcomes, it’s important to know that most problems of this kind are small fries that a competent store will brush off or learn their way around and not get too hung up on or be losing big chunks of money. A small amount of trickle loss to this sort of thing is unavoidable and it is essential that you keep that under control and not let it fester. The refined processes you practice every day for the small stuff will come in handy when you have to deal with a bigger, more expensive dispute.
Have a great week!