Unpaid Item preferences allows eBay to automatically cancel and re-list items that remain unpaid for after a specified number of days.

Important! Unpaid item disputes are no longer supported by eBay. What had been called the Unpaid Item Assistant is now Unpaid Item Preferences.

The Unpaid Item Assistant automatically created an unpaid item dispute after a specified number of days passed without payment. With Unpaid Item Preferences, a seller can enable preferences so that eBay will automatically cancel an order and re-list after a specified number of days without payment.

For additional information, refer to Resolving unpaid items with buyers.

To configure Unpaid Item Preferences to automatically cancel an unpaid order, the seller must enable the Automatically cancel unpaid items setting through Unpaid Item Preferences or through the SetUserPreferences call. With Unpaid Item Preferences, the seller can control the following actions:

  • How many days to wait without payment from buyer before the order is canceled. Options range from 4 days to 30 days.
  • eBay automatically re-listing the item when the order is canceled.
  • Creating an Exclusion List of buyers. For the buyers on this list, the seller will have to manually cancel orders for unpaid items.

Automatic cancellation

Both SetUserPreferences and GetUserPreferences include the UnpaidItemAssistancePreferences container. This container is defined by the UnpaidItemAssistancePreferencesType.

One of the fields in the container is OptInStatus. A value of true in this field indicates that the seller has opted into Unpaid Item Preferences which automatically cancels an order when a buyer has not sent payment within the specified UnpaidItemAssistancePreferences.DelayBeforeOpeningDispute time period. Refer to UnpaidItemAssistancePreferencesType for additional information.

Automatic item relisting

If unpaid orders are automatically canceled through Unpaid Item preferences, the seller can also choose to have the unpaid items automatically relisted by eBay following their cancellation.

The value of UnpaidItemAssistancePreferencesType.AutoRelist reflects the seller's preference for automatically relisting items after unpaid orders have been canceled.

For a multiple-quantity, fixed-price listing, eBay will adjust the quantity if AutoRelist is set to true. This flag is set with SetUserPreferences.

Exclusion lists

A seller may wish to disable automatic order cancellations for specific buyers. The seller specifies these excluded buyers by using the UnpaidItemAssistancePreferences.ExcludedUser field in SetUserPreferences.

A separate ExcludedUser field is required for each user. A maximum of 5,000 users may be specified.

For example, imagine there is a buyer who reliably pays the seller for items within 10 days. The seller has complete faith in this buyer. The seller does not want the automated order cancellation process to apply to this seller. So, the seller includes this buyer's eBay user ID in the ExcludedUser field.

To view the current list of buyers that the seller is excluding from the automated order cancellation process, call GetUserPreferences with ShowUnpaidItemAssistanceExclusionList set to true.

To completely clear the list of buyers, call SetUserPreferences with UnpaidItemAssistancePreferencesType.RemoveAllExcludedUsers set to true.