I posted last week about my horrible eBay buying experiences of late. Well, at the time I wrote that I still had one outstanding transaction to complete. The seller had told me that he was out of town at the time I bought the item, but that the items would ship at the end of the week. Fine, no problem.
Fast forward to the end of the week after the purchase was made (purchase was made on a Monday, so about two weeks later): still no item. The next Monday comes: still no item. So on Monday evening I email the seller asking about the status and noting I am going out of town at the end of the week and need to have it come in ASAP. No response. Follow-up email on Tuesday asking for status and stating I will open a PayPal dispute if I don’t get an update by the next morning. Still nothing, so I file a PayPal dispute this morning. This finally solicits a response:
Sorry, I have been out of town on a family emergency. I can ship this item immediately if the dispute is closed. Until then, paypal will not allow me to access the shipping info.
Seeing as I’m going out of town in less than two days and have been waiting on the items for over two weeks now, I respond back that I will need to have the items sent overnight because I am going out of town, otherwise there will be no one here to accept the shipment. So either overnight them or refund the payment. Easy enough. Crap happens. Well, that gets this response:
I can overnight them, but am not paying the additional shipping charge. I can ship them to another address if it’s paypal confirmed. I am sorry for the delay, but I’ve been out on a family emergency, like I stated in my previous email. I will upgrade your shipping to priority (2-3 days) as an apology, but if I send it overnight, I’ll be loosing money on this transaction and they are now selling on ebay for well over $325 a piece. How would you like to proceed with this?
Um, yeah, did you not just read that I will not be here in 2-3 days? And who has multiple confirmed addresses, anyway? Sorry, but your family emergency shouldn’t cost me more money and I’m certainly not going to pay extra to get something that should have been sent out over a week ago anyway. So I reply again either overnight or refund, which solicits this:
By refunding your item, I’m out a significant amount of money.
Paypal Fee: $19.15
Ebay Listing Fee: $15.20
Ebay Final Value Fee: $32.75
Total: $67.10
Is it not possible to send it elsewhere?
No, moron! The fees you incur aren’t my problem. The problem was of your creation, not mine. I want it sent to my home address. I don’t want to have to track it down while on the road. I just want my money back. So after another email asking I take delivery at a different address and another request for either an overnight or a refund, I get this gem:
Well, I really do not intend to be rude, however I am not going to refund your payment. I will just ship the consoles to the address below and purchase delivery confirmation. If I scan the delivery confirmation receipt to send to paypal, my money will be refunded. Since ebay has no minimum shipping time requirement and I had a family member who was extremely ill, there is no possible retribution other then your negative feedback. I would thoroughly appreciate us just working out something so that both of us are happy so that we do not have to put ourselves in that predicament. Again, I apologize for being rude, but I do not want incur the nearly $70 extra that refunding your money would cost me.
The hell you will! eBay may not have a shipping time requirement, but your seller protection rules on PayPal dictate 7 days from payment date. It also requires that you get a signature confirmation on items over $250 to be covered, and if no one is here there is no one to sign, meaning you won’t get the signature confirmation. Bluff called! Again, either ship overnight or give me a refund. It isn’t that complicated! Well, it gets more complicated:
I’m at my place in NYC. The Post office is already closed. I can ship it to your hotel tomorrow, or we can not, and I’ll just keep the dispute until paypal refunds it, which will take around 2 weeks. I can EASILY get $350 a piece for these on ebay right now, but that will cost me a little. You need two wii’s and I have 2. It will only cost us each more if we don’t go through with this transaction.
Oh, hell no! By this time you should have figured out you aren’t dealing with a newbie, so you really shouldn’t have done that. In my last attempt to save him from himself, I noted that I can simply dispute the charge with my credit card company and have the charge removed from my account immediately. In the process, he will be dinged for the service fee PayPal charges sellers on chargebacks, which is $10. Plus the negative feedback I will give to add a little insult to injury. Not to mention that there is no way you will get $350 (amazing, three emails ago it was $325) now that eBay has pulled the plug on the Live.com cashback which allowed sellers to inflate their listing prices. When I checked this evening, there were listings at $299.99 with free shipping. Amazingly, this is the response:
You can play it that way if you wish. Please let me know the address to ship it to if you change your mind.
Well, true to my word I called Citi this evening a disputed the charge on the credit card.
What a freaking moron! This guy is so desperate to make this transaction go through, he tries to bully his will on a buyer, and then offers to do things that would disqualify him from the seller protection policy, and then refuses the refund only to be certainly hit with the chargeback fee on his account.
This guy is actually very lucky I am honest, because if I wasn’t after he pissed me off I would have given him an unconfirmed address to ship to and then filed a buyer protection claim with PayPal to get the payment back. The dispute would have been ruled in my favor since the seller didn’t send to the confirmed address or within 7 days of payment, and I would have ended up with two free Wii’s. Oh well, not worth my eternal soul to get a couple of free game consoles and really stick it to a douchebag.
Again, I am done with eBay as a buyer. I’m not sure if it is just a bunch of amateurs are getting into the game reselling stuff they bought with a Live.com cashback rebate, a general decline in the caliber of sellers on eBay, or just bad luck, but eBay buying just isn’t worth the hassle anymore.
Does he not realize that if he issues a refund through paypal, all he’ll lose is the listing fees? The Final value fee and the paypal fees are refunded to him as well. What an amateur.