Entertainment For Lively Minds
ATM: When Ebay goes wrong
Well, after a decade of use, with hundreds of transactions worth thousands of dollars I've finally had my Ebay cherry popped with a dodgy deal. I'm trying to give this guy the benefit of the doubt, and I'd like to think that he was just mistaken, but I suspect I've been had.
The original item is Ebay Item# 290632523536
Note that it is "as-new" and has "only been used as a display model for training". It was purchased as a gift for my father for Christmas.
When I received the item I sent him a WTF? email and followed it up yesterday with some photos: http://s1231.photobucket.com/albums/ee515/podicle1/Thermapen/
Note that the photo he provided in the listing was taken from the only possible angle that shows no damage. His replies are full of indignation and claims that the photos are not of the item he sent (registered, btw. He is in Glasgow and I am in Australia). Like I'm going to buy a $50 buck thermometer from someone halfway around the world just to carry out a scam.
I'm not sure anyone who had handled the item, let alone photographed it, could make this mistake and believe the item was "as new".
Anyway, I've initiated a PayPal dispute, for what it's worth. He's offered to refund the money after I ship the item back to him (at my cost), which I'm not comfortable doing.
What do you (gender non-specific) guys think? Could this guy genuinely be mistaken, or is he dodgy?
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Sounds dodgy to me
The photo angle and complete denial make it hard to believe he didn't know what he was doing.
Probably not dodgy
just lazy, slapdash and hoping you wouldn't think it was worth complaining.
On the plus side PayPal ALWAYS find in favour of the buyer. In this case they may make you jump through hoops with a third party opinion and you may have to return it, but as long as the seller agrees to rufund your postage, it's all in your favour as far as PayPal is concerned.
PayPal don't always find in favour of the buyer...
...earlier this year I was sold a fake iPhone for £250. I started the PayPal dispute right away and was sent the print-off label to return the item via signed-for service. I dropped the package off at my PO, explaining to the man behind the counter (who is very familiar with me as a customer) that the package was to go via special delivery. A week went by and the seller claimed still not to have received the item in return. After some time going back and forth with PayPal, I went back to the PO and asked the counter man what he'd done with the parcel. He'd only gone and given it to the 'normal' postman, not the special parcel force guy. So, I didn't get a PayPal refund and they found in favour of the seller, despite me explaining what had happened, and having found a weakness in their system.
I ended up tracing the seller via Facebook, emailed him describing what he looked like, his clothing etc and told him I'd be turning up on his doorstep. He refunded my money that afternoon. Prick.
SO... be careful when you send it back.
Having said all this, I bought a pair of incredibly difficult-to-find rear doors for my old camper from a bloke in Italy. I asked him specifically about damage before going through with the transaction and he said there was none (photos were inconclusive). When they arrived… you guessed it. PayPal refunded my money and said there was no need to return the doors. The cash paid for their restoration. Result.
Those camper doors?
Did they come from a Mr Charlie Croker?
I don't remember his name...
...but am fairly certain it was Italian. Why do you ask?
This.....
Sorry!
Ah
I've only seen the film once and - sorry - hated it! Apart from the car chases, natch.
How annoying
Looks to me like he has been busted for gilding the lily a bit and is now waving his arms about hoping you'll back off. I always tend to look for cockup before conspiracy, and I think (charitably) he just as different standards of what new condition is. Certainly I agree with you!
I had one bad experience with eBay - I bought a roll up piano keyboard, an impulse buy, which a moment's thought should have told me would be crap, and crap it was. I had a nightmare getting my money back - the seller basically avoided taking delivery, despite me sending it for signature - he just left it at the Post Office and kept insisting that it wasn't where. I rang the Post Office and the guy on the other end said "I'm standing looking at it - we definitely have it!!!" I broke the deadlock by starting an ebay dispute, though eBay are deffo vendor centric rather than buyer like PayPal.
I'd demand that he refunds your money plus postage or you'll launch a dispute. But he'll certainly fight back. Shame- it works so well, until it doesn't.
Did you buy using...
...a credit card as your funding source? Because if not, always always do.
Here's why: PayPal like to imagine that they're a proper financial institution and their marketing and guideline materials give the impression that they're empowered to settle "disputes" between parties to a transaction. They are not. Which is why their dispute system is so shite - it has no teeth at all.
So what you do is you use a credit (not debit) card as your only funding source. In the event of something going bad, you phone your credit card provider and initiate a chargeback. They'll send you a form to fill in, and you state that the transaction wasn't fulfilled adequately by the seller. This reverses the transaction, bypasses PayPal entirely and PayPal can't do a thing about it apart from get a bit pissy.
I've done this maybe twice in my guitar-shopping-spree phase a few years ago. Worked fine.
I do this for
any item worth more than a couple of hundred bucks.
My expereince was that they favour the buyer
Which is why I sell now't on there any more.
I used to offer buyers insurance and stated that if they didn't take it, if the goods didn't turn up, it was their look out. No-one ever took it. I persuaded a slightly reluctant GLW to sell an unwanted Cartier handbag and thought little of it when the buyer ignored the suggestion of insurance. Big mistake on my part.
A claim for non delivery followed and when I pointed out the buyer had refused insurance a guy at PayPal said "it doesn't matter. You should always use insurance". He couldn't explain why listings were allowed that didn't offer it. As I had funds in my PayPal account they just took the money - well, all but £3. Which they then threatened debt collectors for its recovery. And froze my account so I couldn't pay in the £3 to clear it. Genius.
The dispute root is the way to go.
I could be wrong
but I believe the responsibility for delivery lies with the seller, and you can't get out of it by offering the buyer insurance. So you should always insure items of value yourself.
Also, in my experience 'recorded delivery' doesn't help. In the one eBay dispute I've had, I returned an item by recorded delivery, but the original recipient denied having got it and RM couldn't tell who had signed for it. The counter clerk told me that RD items are just chucked in with the rest of the post and fished out again at the end. At worst, the RD sticker is a nice little flag for nefarious types, indicating potential contents of value.
Odd, though
The seller has a positive rating of 914, and 725 feedbacks as a seller, of which yours appears to be the only negative one - all the rest are positive. All of which seems to suggest this is a decent, reliable seller, with an examplary track record. Apart from this once. First time for everything, eh?
Ahhh, but
the episode I recounted above, I gave him negative feedback which was removed by mutual consent as part of the dispute process. Had I left it we'd never have resolved it.
Which
sort of distorts the whole purpose of feedback, doesn't it? Of course, I'd forgotten that negative feedback can be removed "by mutual consent", which obviously gets used as a bargaining chip in dispute resolution, even though the buyer still remembers the transaction as a bad experience! Mind you, removing the negative feedback isn't the same as giving a positive feedback, so I usually look for sellers with a large number of the latter. I must say I've only had 2 or 3 "bad purchases" out of many hundreds over the last decade or so.
eBay...
...seems to have gone out of its way to make the whole experience less satisfactory in recent years. Feedback has been gutted and neutered, PayPal is practically a three-line whip, and number of genuine bargains appear to have reduced in line with the number of "real" businesses trading on there - although that correlation is pretty loose and might not be causally linked at all. Of course, I'm just speaking for guitar-related stuff, which is pretty much all I've ever bought, but the days of the eBay "score" are pretty much over, as far as I can see.
I agree
It's more useful as a virtual market now. Stuff like weird light bulbs you can't find anywhere or motorbike bits you can get on eBay. But winning something fab for cheap in an auction seems to have disappeared by and large.
I refuse to use Ebay
For the various reasons that have been mentioned above. If I'm buying something, I want to be able to look at it first. I don't want to wander through an Online Market Square and have a stranger flog me some tat from his stall. I'm sure the majority of folk on there are reliable etc, but I'm still cynical about the whole process.
I still use it all the time
I still use it all the time, since first doing so in 1999. Particularly for buying clothes. I lost a load of weight in the last year or two and sold virtually all of my wardrobe on eBay and replaced it with the kind of things I couldn't afford to buy new. If you know what you're looking for and are dogged about pursuing it, bargains are there to be had every day.
Best recent one, though, is this: I've wanted a Leica Digilux 2 for ages, but they still sell for £650+. There is an excellent Panasonic equivalent, same lens, that sells for about £300-ish. Still a bit thick for me. However, I found a faulty example, boxed, mint condition, but needs a new sensor. This is a common issue with the Leica and Panasonic models and a free sensor replacement is still offered five or six years down the line. Paid £60 for it and my God am I chuffed?
Few problems
that were sorted in good time, including a fraudster cleaning out my bank account via my Paypal account.
I hadn't used the site for a few months for either buying or selling and when I went to list an item recently I was asked to verify security questions.
I ended up speaking to one of those weird helpdesk people with voices like robots and told her that the questions she was asking relate to phone numbers and addresses I used over five years ago and could not remember them. Fair enough that we needed to find another way then. Not fair enough for a business founded purely because of the internet that I was asked to fax some information to them.
FAX? I asked her whether I had stumbled into the eighties and hung up.
Then I created a new ebay account with my work address and sold what I wanted.
Strange system and strange staff but I can't deny its usefulness for a bit of extra pocket money over Christmas.