Pay with a check on ebay auction?

I think you have your bases covered with waiting until the check clears before sending the item. If you do tell them they can pay by check make sure they understand that they will have to wait while it happens.

I accept personal checks on my auctions, but since I don’t have a local branch of my bank I go to the bank inside the PX on base and they cash it for me (as long as it’s less than $200), so I get my money immediately.

The big questions is, “How do you know when the check has cleared?”

I have a 21 day wait on anything paid for by personal check because it can take 21 days (15 business days) for us to be notified that a check has bounced. Right up to that point, the money is in our account. Then if the check bounces the money is gone, and we have a bank fee to pay on top of that. I once made the mistake of shipping something on day 20, and the Not Sufficient Funds notification came later the same day.

However, from the customer’s point of view, they could well get their cashed check (or legal facsimile) back from their bank in just a few days, so if anyone complains to me that their check has cleared and why have I not sent the item, I just ask them to send me a copy of their cashed check (with my endorsement on the back) and I’ll get the shipment out.

You can probably pay extra to have a check processed more quickly; even pretty much immediately. You’d need to talk to your bank about that. I don’t think it’s worth the extra cost.

I had this problem when I was a District Manager for one of the two local city newspapers. You pay the paper, but basically how it works is the DM buys the papers in wholesale, sells them to the carriers, and the carriers sell them to the customers. The newspaper does all the accounting for everyone and takes customer payment on behalf of the DM though, so on the surface it doesn’t look like a wholesale operation.

End of the line is, the DM gets shafted when a customer doesn’t pay. If the customer writes a cheque to “The Edmonton Sun”, the DM has written authority on file to cash the cheque.

So I’d end up getting cheques back with my statement that had bounced, and by then the customer has gotten a month’s worth of papers for free, and you could only claim back two weeks of bad service. So you get shafted for two weeks.

I solved the problem by talking to the bank, and they gave me keys for one of their in-branch mailboxes. Then if a cheque bounced, it was in my mailbox the next day, and the customer was cut immediately. No more losses.