Experiences with ebay?

[MalibuChloe]

Have any of you had bad experiences with ebay, such as not getting the product you paid for? What did you do?

[Tafiti]

1. Out of about 35 transactions,

all as a buyer, I've never had to deal with any shenanigans. Product arrived as advertised every time.

But maybe I've just been lucky.

[ComerPerro]

2. I've bought two things on ebay, and never really had a problem

Both were, yes, I'll admit it, Transformers action figures, Decepticon jets (the F15s, from the origional series) because I wanted to complete my collection. I had Starscream, just needed the other two.

[Dukkha]

3. 2 out of 250

got my money back on one got alt merchandise on the other

[dad]

4. One time out of about 40 to 50 purchases

It was a real hassle. I found the BBB is useless in this situation, as is eBay's own internal system. What worked was getting the attention of my state's Attorney General. Next time go that route first.

[KitchenWitch]

5. I had one instance

The seller sent me someone else's item and sent someone else my item. It took over a month to get it cleared up...They kept telling me that they would put it in the mail "tomorrow". I waited until they gave me a positive feedback rating before I gave them a negative...

Apparently they had problems fulfilling their auction activity - I kept getting the excuse that the person on the other end was working 80 hours a week on top of a full time eBay Powerseller commitment. Which was why they kept forgetting to mail my item.

Needless to say, they had other complaints...and they are no longer selling anything on eBay.

I guess if my work commitment was 80 hours a week, I would think twice about trying to run a full time eBay business.

[bikebloke]

6. Misrepresented item

I thought I was buying a remastered version of a CD. Turned out it was the regular version, which I could have picked up anywhere retail even cheaper. Returned it for a refund. I think I found the correct version through half.com.

[Xithras]

7. Only once, and he refunded me quickly.

The trick with EBay is to look at someones feedback. Never buy from someone with a feedback score of less than 10, who's been a member for under a week, or who's feedback was all received within a week or two. Look for long time EBayers with high feedback scores. Oh, and actually READ their feedback. My sister was screwed by a guy who sent her a busted VCR. When I asked about his score, she said "It was over 250!". When I looked at his feedback, a HUGE percentage of it was either bad or neutral.

If you use the tools that are there, EBay is plenty safe.

[Lisa]

8. I've had more than 70 transactions -- 3 were a bust

Most of them went just fine. In those 3 other cases, where I paid and nothing ever arrived, the vendors didn't have PayPal so I didn't have the extra protection that provides. The thing is, you have to do something about it within 3 months or eBay doesn't offer you much help. (After that, you can't even post a bad rating to warn other people.) I was trying to hold down 2 full-time jobs last year, and I didn't have the time to deal with the defaulters until after the 90 days had elapsed.

I've vowed to stay on top of my transactions from now on. One case involved a DVD from someone with an eBay store. He actually had, in the small print of his posting, the information that he was not obliged to fix things up if the client didn't complain within that 3-month window.

One of the other people (the situation where I paid the most money, more than $200) kept stringing me along for weeks, finally getting his family members to send me heartrending notes about how he was ill and unable to work. (He'd been using his grandma's eBay account, so all the positive ratings convinced me he'd be okay to deal with.) The situation got so bizarre that quite frankly, I started to get kind of scared about what those people were capable of!

I suppose I could go after them for mail fraud (I do have documentation that I sent the money -- postal money order carbons, etc.), but again there's no guarantee I'd get my money back.

I might just have to write it off to experience. Also, the place where I mailed the money order for the latter case was right in the path of Hurricane Rita -- and he mentioned that he was "on the water".

So he may end up needing that money, after all.


p.s. another thing I've vowed to do is to heed my own instincts. The 2 cases which caused me the most hassle (not the DVD guy) probably resulted because I succumbed to the temptation to get something terrific for a ridiculously low price. They looked too good to be true (handmade replica of a Roman Imperial Gallic "G" helmet, and a stainless-steel Gothic breastplace, respectively).

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

9. I've had just one buying experience and it was so-so

I bought a jazz fakebook that supposedly was the same compilation of tunes of Bill Evans' famous personal fakebook. The fakebook arrived with about 15 missing pages right in the middle. I e-mailed the seller and they sent me the separate pages that were missing, telling me it was probably an exception, a book that had been badly put together. The problem is that I couldn't find a hole puncher that matched the peculiar holes in the separate pages to integrate them into the rest of the book.