When a Buyer Asks You to Hold an Item

Someone asks you to keep an item back for them until payday. It is a small thing to say yes to and it sounds like nothing, so most sellers agree without thinking. Then a fortnight passes, they have gone quiet, and the item has been off the market the whole time.

The thing to understand is that a hold is not free. For as long as it lasts you cannot sell that item to anybody else, and you also cannot really list it, because a listing that might already be spoken for is worse than no listing. You are lending someone your shelf space and they are paying nothing for it.

None of which means refuse. Holds are perfectly reasonable, and a buyer who asks rather than vanishing is being straight with you. It means put an end on it at the moment you agree, in the same message. Say you will keep it until Friday. Not indefinitely, not until they are ready, until a specific day you have both now seen written down.

For anything cheap that is enough. For anything that took real work, or that you would otherwise have sold quickly, ask for a deposit. It does not have to be much. Its job is not the money, it is that a person who has put something down turns up, and a person who has put nothing down sometimes does not. Say plainly what happens to that deposit if the day passes, and say it before they send it, so it can never be a surprise afterwards.

When the day arrives and nothing has come, one short message is enough. You are putting it back up today, and they are welcome if it is still there. No irritation, no lecture. Most of the time you never hear anything and that is your answer.

Two rules keep this simple. Do not hold anything you would struggle to remake, and never hold two things at once for someone who has not yet bought one.