May 13

Recently I have had the pleasure of selling stuff through eBay before we head home. As a buyer it is great. You hold all the cards. As a seller it is crap. Here are 2 examples of how people tried to screw us over:

1) We listed a mudguard of my stolen bike. A guy won it, and paid. We went to get it out and realised it was missing a vital part of the clamping mechanism. We cancelled the auction and refunded his money £0.99. He then started going on and on about how his son had to ride to school and get his school uniform dirty etc and then telling us that he “didn’t know what feedback to give”. In the end for the situation to be resolved i offered to buy him one on eBay and have it shipped to his address if he made the payment again. He would not do that. He expected us to send it and if he was happy with it he would pay the money back. In the end we told him that we would have no security that he would pay etc and he decided to leave neutral feedback.

2) We listed a PDA (6 years old). A guy in Italy won it. We sent it in good working order. He got it and claimed there were 22 dead pixels. He raised a PayPal dispute and his resolution was for us to refund £15 out of the £17 he paid for it. We decided that wasn’t fair and asked him to send it back for a full refund which he refused to do. So his claim was closed. He then decided that it would be fair to leave me negative feedback. When i contacted him to ask him why they bad feedback as we tried to resolve the issue he said if i paid him £15 he would remove the feedback. This is now in the hands of PayPal.

I think that they need to allow the seller to give negative feedback and not be held to ransom by the buyers! In both cases we went above and beyond to try and resolve the issues and got nowhere. Anyone else experienced this?

2 Responses to “eBay is flawed”

  1. gerrod Says:

    Yeah it’s a tough system for the sellers. I’m always careful to check whatever I’m selling and describe it’s exact condition. I’m then always surprised by how much people will pay for stuff – I got something like 60 quid for a 3rd Generation iPod (40gb drive, b/w screen) which had zero battery life!

  2. nathan Says:

    Yeah i know. We have sold a heap of stuff on there. It is just the few that want something for nothing that spoil it for everyone.

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