What The Hell Is Wrong With Some Ebay Sellers?

[Tinsair]

On the other end of the spectrum I had a totally opposite experience this week. I won a Lego Batman on ebay for some pittance like £2.70 or something. Postage was quoted at around £2. The seller e-mailed me and advised that I had something like 89p change from the postage costs that he'll refund me. I haven't yet, but I'm just gonna tell him to pocket it.

Bloody hell, that was nice of him. We need more people like that in the world of eBay for sure, yeah I'd do the same just tell him to keep it, would feel guilty if I'd have took it back

[Cortex]

I make sure that I only buy from sellers that have photos of the actual item & have at least 99% positive feedback (although I usually go for the 100% sellers).

Unfortuately the feedback thing is heavily weighed against the sellers.

I recently sold a game via buy it now and received no payment from the seller. I contacted them twice politely requesting payment to no avail, and then had to go through a resolution process with eBay to get my final value fee refunded. I was not refunded the insertion fee, so I'm out of pocket.

That was a bad buyer that deserved bad feedback. Can I leave bad feedback? Nope.

On the other hand, I have on my eBay travels noticed buyers that leave a trail of unreasonable bad feedback on every other item they purchase. I saw one guy leaving reasons such as "slow", "avoid", on power sellers who otherwise had 1000s of positive feedback points. (Might I mention that the guy was buying U.K. items from Australia?) What repurcussions does he face? None, eBay's attitude is "freedom of speech", only to the buyers of course.

It is always wise to check a feedback rating before making a purchase, but if you do encounter a seller with bad feedback, for heaven's sake - check to see their response before writing them off. A lot of the time it can be the a case of an eBay newb thinking their first and only port of call is to leave bad feedback without even contacting the seller to seek a resoluion.

[mr_gibbage]

I don't think it is possible really to have a fair system for feedback. There will always be idiots out to ruin it for others, if it was returned to where the seller could leave negative feedback for the buyer you then get the old problem of sellers holding buyers to ransom with the threat of a negative.

[mr_gibbage]

What an ar*ehole!! £4.50 for postage is a joke aswell. No wonder you're peed off, I certainally would be.

I thought there were limits on what you could charge for postage? Could always be reported for that.

[JoeTheUseless]

You could tell he wanted to put you off the sale as much as possible so he could relist it at a higher Buy It Now Price
i had a annoying problem last week with the seller not responding to my emails and she didnt dispatch my game then 2 weeks later got the same typical excuse i was on holiday she only started responding to me when i left her negative feedback and opened a paypal case against her lol we should have a post on here thats called Ebay Sellers Beware so no one has similer problems

[hash47]

Other times people can be really good on eBay, a few ago my sister wanted to use my eBay to sell a bunch of old designer cloths. Knowing how useless my sister is i hesitated but let her use my account anyway. She sold and posted most of the items before i went to Africa for a month, and then the day before i left the last two items sold, so i told her to send them out ASAP.

A month later i come back and find out she never bothered posting the items, rushed down the post office and sent them, the buyers were surprisingly understanding and still left positive feedback!

[muppet42]

The chap the OP was mentioning did sound more than a little awkward about arrangements and the like. I think if you're selling to collectors, which for a game like that at the prices they're going for you'd be expecting to, then you really have to have some sort of leeway in that respect. I've done that when selling off sealed Lego items for example - it makes sense so you get good feedback

That was one thing I was paranoid about doing when I started selling some of my stuff on eBay - getting the packing, postage costs and not leaving out anything in the description. For postage costs, I always look at other auctions and get a sort of average rate so I'm not going over the top. If I can't do that, I'll go to the post office and get a quote - just common sense really.

I always work out also figure in the actual packing materials and the like as well so I never try and go overboard on anything like that. Plus I almost "over-describe" the item and send a personal message to each buyer letting them know when its been sent rather than just leaving it to the "dispatch generic message" so nothing's left to chance. I guess you could use the other approach and leave everything out like many game sellers do and adopt the "get what you paid for" approach of plausible deniability

I'm still paranoid about getting bad feedback though but I'm also aware a good number of buyers don't bother leaving feedback at all, which kind of sucks

[maD_mAN1983]

i have learned that it is always good too check shipping prices at different sellers with the same item, have seen big differences, some want 2£ for shipping to Norway, but others want 20£ for the same item, and the item itself was at the same price, so a no brainer for me when choosing who to buy from (as long as both have good feedback)

[GregPandemic]

I recently bought Lost in Blue for the Wii, listed "As New" so all good, received it and it was mint but no manual.

Mailed assuming it was a mistake and they would send it on, she gets back saying no it wasn't a mistake but she did have the manual and would sell me it.

After explaining that I would in no way pay extra for something that should have been included and informed her she could send it for free or refund me completely she reported me to Ebay and accused me off threatening her.

It was just bizarre and I raised a claim and got a refund, she never did even ask for the game back so I got it for free in the end.

On that note does anybody have a spare Lost in Blue manual??

[RobGone16Bit]

I recently bought Lost in Blue for the Wii, listed "As New" so all good, received it and it was mint but no manual.

Mailed assuming it was a mistake and they would send it on, she gets back saying no it wasn't a mistake but she did have the manual and would sell me it.

After explaining that I would in no way pay extra for something that should have been included and informed her she could send it for free or refund me completely she reported me to Ebay and accused me off threatening her.

It was just bizarre and I raised a claim and got a refund, she never did even ask for the game back so I got it for free in the end.

what a dumbass seller lol

For me so far I haven't had too much problems with sellers, i've had to file claims a few times and there was one annoyance buying a gamecube which turned out to be faulty, the seller accused me of trying to pull a fast one and refused to cover the postage back. He insisted the console was working, I got so pissed off that I just sent it back to him which put me out of pocket only for the twat to turn around once he got it and admit it wasn't working. He refunded me but not the amount I spent to send it back. All thing happen for a reason and I have since learn't from this, especially when buying used consoles.

[hydr0x]

Ah, man, you missed a perfectly good chance for revenge. You should just have paid, and once the unrecorded package shows up at yours you would then file a PayPal claim for non-received item. After all, if he didn't send it recorderd despite u even paying extra for recorded, you'd have had no problem whatsoever getting a full refund from PayPal. That would have taught him a lesson.

[atomic]

As mentioned earlier on this thread, ebay is heavily weighted against seller, which is surprising as it is the seller that provide them with their profits. I use ebay as both a buyer and seller, selling retro game stuff I get from bootsales, etc to fund my actual collection. Selling can be difficult as I get a lot more problems nowadays then I used too, so maybe it's a sign of the times. I blocked all my problematic buyers to stop them bidding in future, one buyer was after a partial refund for a game that they claimed didn’t work (I had tested it as working), but they didn’t want to send back for a full refund + postage for some reason. The same buyer a few weeks later then contacted me saying they couldn't bid on another of my items, despite not be happy with their previous purchase (???). Buyers can use the feedback system to "blackmail" seller into offering refunds or discounts and ebay have done nothing to stamp this out (it's not if they can't see the emails the sellers has sent me).

An classic example of how the feedback system doesn't punish bad sellers would be one of my auctions that ended a couple of weekends ago. The buyer didn't pay within 24 hours so sent an invoice via ebay. Still no payment after four days (the payment time limit I state in my auction), so I sent a polite message to remind them to pay. I then did some checking to find out that this buyer had bid on an identical item to the one I was selling, but bid for this about 30 mins after bidding on mine. He got this second item about £1 cheaper and had already paid for it (the positive feedback was already on his account from the other seller). After seven days I raised a “non-payer” dispute through ebay to try and get back the fees that I have already been charged. However the buyer will still get to keep their 100% feedback and only get a “non-payment strike”, which doesn't really act as much of a punishment unless you get a few of them.

Unfortunately if you are looking to get the best prices then there is no real competition for ebay, and as a seller you have to “take the hit” from dodgy buyers and learn from it.

[argan1985]

What an ar*ehole!! £4.50 for postage is a joke aswell. No wonder you're peed off, I certainally would be.

I thought there were limits on what you could charge for postage? Could always be reported for that.

Ok, I've just recently been starting use eBay again (after a 2-year hiatus), but the seller can't leave negative feedback anymore? Wow...