More Fun Selling Stuff On Reverb

This beautiful piece went up for sale on Reverb. I received an offer which was really close to what I wanted to receive for the unit and so I accepted the offer. Sometimes when the offer price is close enough, I don’t counter. It all depends.

The very next evening the buyer backed out.

As you can tell from my reply, I wasn’t too happy about the buyer’s request. This from the Reverb site:

Am I required to make a purchase if my offer is accepted?

Yes, once your offer is accepted, or you accept a seller’s counteroffer, the listing will be considered purchased by you. You’ll get an email notification as well as an “Unpaid Order” notification in the upper right hand corner of Reverb. You’ll then be able to check out and pay via the orders page in the “Buying” section of your Reverb account.

Abandoning orders after your offer is accepted creates extremely frustrating experiences for sellers, so Reverb frowns upon it strongly. Buyers with multiple abandoned orders are subject to negative feedback or account suspension. Please only make an offer on an item if you intend on following through with your purchase.

Okay. Life moves on. I was annoyed but the equipment is top flight and I was confident that another buyer would come along.

And sure enough, one did. Another Reverb user jumped on the re-listed item literally within a few hours of me cancelling the first order.

A much lower offer so I countered. And this buyer agreed to a price that was, oddly enough, the exact same price as the first buyer.

So, I jumped over to my order list. This is what I found:

It was the exact same name and address for both orders — I redacted most of it for obvious reasons. Same price, same address, same name.

So I contacted Reverb support.

(07:05:53 PM) Richard Cleaver: I have had two orders for a Mic Pre that I am selling. One asked to cancel the listing. Then I received a second offer shortly after the cancellation which was much lower than the first offer. I countered and the buyer came back with a price that was the same as the first offer. On my order summary, I have the order number 3503733 that was cancelled and the same name and address is also showing on the pending order 3515995 even though the offer came through a different name. The only difference between the two orders is the phone number. Should I be concerned?
(07:05:59 PM) *** Nate J. joined the chat ***
(07:06:33 PM) Nate J.: Hey Nate J with Reverb here
(07:06:42 PM) Nate J.: Let me take a look at the buyer and I’ll let you know
(07:06:52 PM) Richard Cleaver: Thank you!
(07:07:52 PM) Nate J.: So they put in another offer on this?
(07:08:25 PM) Richard Cleaver: It looks that way to me. However the second offer came from a different user name
(07:09:34 PM) Nate J.: Yeah looks like that is the case. I see that the buyer has successfully purchased in the past with their previous account and doesn’t have any issues in the past.
(07:13:49 PM) Richard Cleaver: Ok. The first offer came from someone named —- and he cancelled because he didn’t want to have the item shipped from Canada. The second offer came from — ——– however both userids are showing the same address hence my concern. I’ll wait to see if payment clears before acting further. Just odd to me that someone would use a different name to make the second offer…
(07:13:50 PM) Nate J.: It definitely isn’t a normal occurrence on the site so I fully understand the apprehension. Our security team will verify that their payment is good and that their information matches up, including matching their phone number to them.

The payment did come through fine and I shipped the unit out to the buyer. Obviously the buyer really wanted the unit and perhaps had second thoughts about cancelling the order or tried to come in with a lower amount thinking that I might go down further in price.

Love using Reverb and experiences like this one add some drama to what is ordinarily a fairly straightforward task of buying and selling gear.