Another "fishy" sale on ebay/paypal

Hey guys, I'm back with another fishy occurrence.

I'm like 99% sure that I didn't list 20 quantity of my item for sale. I never list that many when I post.
Somehow, this buyer was able to purchase 16 quantity. Ebay shows it as item sold, 16 quantity and
paypal confirms payment received in excess of $300ish range.

But how did he purchase 16 of it? I mean, I don't really want to complain because that's great if he did and I made that many sales, but it seems fishy. Also, to make matters fishier, this buyer had actually bought 4 last night of this item, but requested to cancel it 5 minutes after purchasing and sending payment. I accepted the cancellation request and the money was refunded. I only had 4 quantity listed so when he bought them all, the item was off my selling list and I had to relist it again with 4 quantity.

Then today, he ended up buying from me again but this time 16 quantity. Even when I check the listing, it says 16 sold in 1 hour but I STILL have 4 quantity in my listing! FISHY.

Anyone ever encountered anything like this? Is it a scam related technique?? The buyer is also new, has 0 feedback and account was created way back in 2015, also from Israel.

This is a lot of money/value so I'm afraid to ship it out even though I have seller protection from paypal and all the valid information is there from ebay and paypal (paid).

As for the fishy sale I cannot really comment.
But as to the 20 quantity in your listing. When you relist an item Ebay will automatically populate the available quantity with the number of items sold through the previously active listing. Say you start a listing with 5 available then sell a few and revise the listing and add 5 more. Once you sell out and relist it will automatically fill in a quantity of 10.
If you use the good til cancelled option instead of the 30 day your listing will stay active even if you sell out. You will just have to revise the quantity once it reaches 0 in order for your listing to show up in the searches.
If the transaction makes you nervous you could cancel it but if you use out of stock as a reason it will give you a defect on your seller account. Also I am pretty sure the buyer can still give you negative feedback even though the transaction was cancelled.
Good luck.

Old Dog said:

As for the fishy sale I cannot really comment.
But as to the 20 quantity in your listing. When you relist an item Ebay will automatically populate the available quantity with the number of items sold through the previously active listing. Say you start a listing with 5 available then sell a few and revise the listing and add 5 more. Once you sell out and relist it will automatically fill in a quantity of 10.
If you use the good til cancelled option instead of the 30 day your listing will stay active even if you sell out. You will just have to revise the quantity once it reaches 0 in order for your listing to show up in the searches.
If the transaction makes you nervous you could cancel it but if you use out of stock as a reason it will give you a defect on your seller account. Also I am pretty sure the buyer can still give you negative feedback even though the transaction was cancelled.
Good luck.

Click to expand...

Looks like you were right. I went to the listing that only had 4 quantity listed, but when I clicked on "sell similar" I noticed it automatically put 29 in the quantity box, so I guess when I sold 16, it must have been listed with 20 in quantity when I listed it as 4. It's all okay now. I shipped out the products with tracking.

Talking of 'fishy sales' I once bought a (dead) catfish on eBay for a penny from a Singaporean seller. I advertised it on Craigslist Singapore but the listing got removed for some reason.