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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;-jeffB, post: 1959520, member: 27832&quot;]As I recall, if you set out to BIN on an auction that requires immediate payment, eBay prompts you with an intermediate screen allowing you to go buy other stuff from the same seller, and warning you that you won&#039;t get combined shipping if you buy and pay for things individually. Since I&#039;m usually trying to pounce on BINs that are priced well below the going rate, I&#039;ve never gone through this process -- I&#039;m always in a hurry to pay before someone else does.</p><p><br /></p><p>I did have an incident a couple of years ago, when the Immediate Payment feature was new, where I was able to make the payment, but <i>someone else still beat me to the item</i>. There was what computer folks call a &quot;race condition&quot; between eBay&#039;s logic and PayPal&#039;s logic, and it ended up <b>letting two people pay for the same thing</b> -- THE cardinal no-no in electronic payment processing systems (along with &quot;delivering the item without collecting payment&quot;).</p><p><br /></p><p>When I called eBay, first-line customer support basically said &quot;well, ask the seller to give you a refund&quot;. (I did, of course, and the honest seller did so.) I tried to explain to eBay (and PayPal) that this was A Really Big Deal, but didn&#039;t have any luck escalating. I don&#039;t think they have a customer-service flowchart section for &quot;customers with advanced degrees in Computer Science who want to report failures of transactional integrity&quot;. This wasn&#039;t quite at the same level as the GM ignition-switch issue that killed a dozen or more people, but when your <i>business</i> is transferring money, <i>you can&#039;t let this happen, ever</i>.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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