eBay plans to launch new features to combat malicious buyers and protect the rights of merchants

At this month’s Seller Check-in event, Ian Bednowitz , senior director and head of eBay’s protection division , said his team is developing new technology to combat bad actors on eBay .

Bednowitz describes three types of "bad buyer" behavior:

1. The buyer submitted a false SNAD claim (the buyer submitted a false claim and actually just wanted to return the product ).

2. Buyer returns used or damaged item .

3. The buyer returns an empty box or other items.

But Bednowitz said eBay needs help from sellers, who he called on to report bad buyers. "We can't be directly involved , so the only way we know if there's a bad buyer is to get information from the seller " — or suspicious behavior that eBay might spot when looking at claims trends and data .

“When we receive reports from sellers , we prioritize looking at those buyers, ” he said.

Bednowitz also explained the "predictive approach" eBay is working on: " data science models that analyze buyer behavior and their associated accounts . "

He said: " This is a very important area for my team and the platform , and we will use data to predict whether buyers are likely to abuse consumer rights so that we can take action in advance. "

" We try to identify other accounts the buyer may have so that if we have previously identified them for non-compliance , they are not able to continue using eBay under a different account . "

Bednowitz said that if a buyer returns a different item or an empty box — a practice he called “virtual shoplifting” — eBay will suspend the buyer’s account entirely .

However, not everything is black and white. "When we looked at reports against buyers, we found that many buyers were reported by the same seller. When we looked at how many buyers were reported by at least two sellers, we found that only about 10% of buyers met this profile," Bednowitz said.

"Therefore, many times buyers feel that the items they received are not as described, but sellers do not think so. Sometimes buyers open the package and cause some damage when checking the product, but they do not do it intentionally. In this case, it is very difficult to determine whether it is a malicious buyer. Therefore, it is very important for sellers to provide enough information. If multiple sellers report the same buyer, this kind of data will be very useful to us."

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