Three incidents, written down before they happen

01

The three that recur

Applies to marketplace onlyown storefronthybrid

A seller with unique stock listed on more than one surface has a small set of ways an order goes wrong. Two buyers acquire one object. A buyer states that a purchase made on their behalf was not authorized. An offer remains purchasable somewhere after the sale ended it. Each is foreseeable and each has a procedure that can be written in advance.

Writing them in advance changes the conditions under which the decision is made. During an incident the picture is incomplete and the time is short; the same decision made beforehand is made with neither constraint, and the written version is the one that gets applied consistently across occurrences.

02

The five parts each page carries

Applies to marketplace onlyown storefronthybrid

Each procedure is one page with the same five parts, so that using one is practice for the others.

The first action is specified without judgment for a reason. At the start of an incident the cause is not established, so a step that requires knowing the cause is a step that is not taken.

03

Procedure one: two buyers, one object

Applies to marketplace onlyown storefronthybrid

The trigger is two confirmations against one physical item. The first action is withdrawal from every remaining surface, before anything is established, since a third sale during the investigation adds a third buyer to the same object. Establishing which order came first follows.

The decision set in advance is which buyer keeps the item and what the other receives. Precedence by confirmation time applies without a judgment call, and it is one of several rules that do. The compensation is written as a number or a formula, so that it is set outside the conditions of the incident.

Five parts were filled in and the sixth was not. An unresolved row on the page is a question with a place to sit; the same question unresolved at the moment of the incident has no place to sit and is answered by whoever is present.

This incident also produces a measurement. The interval between the two confirmations is an observation of the exposure window on a live item, which is the figure the measurement lesson produces deliberately.

04

Procedure two: a purchase the buyer did not authorize

Applies to marketplace onlyown storefronthybrid

The trigger is a buyer stating that a purchase made on their behalf was not authorized by them. Ahead of the payments question and the customer-service question sits the question of which agreement governs the transaction, which is set by the path the order arrived on.

Two documented facts belong on the page. eBay’s user agreement conditions automated purchasing on permission granted in advance and expressly, so an order that arrived that way on that venue is addressed by the venue’s policy before it is a matter between seller and buyer.¹ On documented paths, the commercial roles sit in merchant terms that are continuously updated,² with participation and conduct requirements set out in commerce policies whose current version is the one in force on the date of the order.³

The first action here is documentary rather than operational: capture the order record, the arrival path, and the timestamps before anything is refunded or amended. A refund can be issued later; the record cannot be reconstructed later.

05

Procedure three: the offer that outlives the sale

Applies to marketplace onlyown storefronthybrid

The trigger is the item found still purchasable somewhere after the sale ended it, whether through a customer enquiry, a search, or a scheduled check. Its cause is structural, which is why it recurs.

The first action is making the public surface accurate rather than establishing why it was not. Availability is a property of the offer rather than of the object,⁴ and an offer whose availability no longer matches the object is what a second buyer acts on while the logs are being read.

1. Make the offer visibly unavailable or visibly sold on the surface where it was found.
2. Check every other surface on the list rather than only the one reported.
3. Record which surface it was, how it was found, and how long the value had been wrong.
4. Where the same surface appears twice in the records, treat it as a configuration finding rather than an incident.

The fourth step is what the record supports. A surface that recurs is one that is not connected to the removal path, and the record is what turns three separate occurrences into one finding with a cause.

06

Keeping the pages short

Applies to marketplace onlyown storefronthybrid

Written procedures fail by growing. A page becomes four, the four are not read during an incident, and the incident is handled from memory with the additional cost of maintaining documents that are not used.

Each procedure stays at one page, and all three are reviewed after any incident that used one. What is added is what would have changed the outcome, and where nothing would have, nothing is added.

07

The three procedures and their inputs

Applies to marketplace onlyown storefronthybrid

eBay’s user agreement states that automated purchasing requires permission granted in advance and expressly.¹ OpenAI’s merchant terms define the commercial relationship on its path,² and its commerce policies state participation and conduct requirements.³ Commerce vocabulary treats availability as a property of the offer.⁴

None of the four states what a seller does when two buyers hold confirmations for one object. That decision is the seller’s, and the page is where it is recorded before the occurrence rather than during it.