Interesting Ebay expereince

[Kenneth Speed]

Recently I purchased a used hand plane on ebay. I paid for it immediately and was informed that I'd have the plane October 3rd. I wasn't in any particular rush for the plane but when October 10th rolled around I thought I should contact the vendor to see if the plane had been lost. I was told that he hadn't shipped it because he'd, "...ran out of boxes and was waiting for a new shipment." Really, I wouldn't have minded if he'd had the courtesy to email me and tell me that shipping was going to be delayed but I felt it was pretty crummy for him to have both my money and the plane. I put in a complaint to ebay and they refunded my money and I received the plane the following day. when I didn't IMMEDIATELY send him the money, the vendor started threatening me with mail fraud! I did pay him after I'd sat on his money for a week or so and I think he got the message.

This is the only problem I've ever had with a buyer or seller on ebay. I'm wondering what the rest of you would have done.


Ken

[Phil Thien]

This is the only problem I've ever had with a buyer or seller on ebay. I'm wondering what the rest of you would have done.


Ken

It all depends on his feedback. If he has a large # of satisfied customers, I would have cut him some slack.

Before filing a complaint, I would have given him a chance to refund the money.

[Mike Henderson]

A seller has certain responsibilities. If they can't ship immediately, they need to contact the buyer and inform him/her why and give an estimated ship date, and perhaps offer to refund the buyer's money. I don't think this is asking too much of a seller, at all.

However, I think filing a claim with eBay (or PayPal) before asking the seller to refund your payment is a bit too much. As soon as I received that response from the seller, I would have gone back and asked when he was going to ship - or ask for my money back. If there was no response, I would then file a claim.

So my opinion is that there was a failure to communicate - by both of you.

Mike

[Charlie Velasquez]

After the threat of mail fraud, I would have sent the seller an email, cc to ebay, telling him I decided not to buy the item; and would send it back as soon as I received a pre-paid shipping label.

[Brian Elfert]

Ebay is only estimating the date when the shipment will arrive to you. There is no guarantee it will arrive by the date given. Ebay is using the number of business days the seller says it will take to ship plus an estimate of how long the shipping should take.

A seller should at least give you the courtesy of letting you know if they will be shipping late.

[Kenneth Speed]

You said, "It all depends on his feedback. If he has a large # of satisfied customers, I would have cut him some slack." I'd already cut him more than weeks' worth of slack. All he had to do was send me an e-mail saying the shipment was going to be delayed. His reluctant claim that he'd run out of boxes sounded like, "My dog ate my homework." and I felt I needed to defend myself from being scammed.

"Before filing a complaint, I would have given him a chance to refund the money." I'd NEVER filed a complaint before and had no idea that ebay was going to reverse the transaction. I suppose it may sound naive but I thought ebay was going to tell him to hurry up and ship the thing.

[Kenneth Speed]

Charlie, you said, "After the threat of mail fraud, I would have sent the seller an email, cc to ebay, telling him I decided not to buy the item; and would send it back as soon as I received a pre-paid shipping label."

His threat was nothing more than a sign that he was afraid he was going to be out the plane AND the money, the same situation he'd put me in. I never took his threat seriously and felt I was getting some of my own back by letting him stew in his own juices for a while.

Ken

[John Fabre]

A seller has certain responsibilities. If they can't ship immediately, they need to contact the buyer and inform him/her why and give an estimated ship date, and perhaps offer to refund the buyer's money. I don't think this is asking too much of a seller, at all.

However, I think filing a claim with eBay (or PayPal) before asking the seller to refund your payment is a bit too much. As soon as I received that response from the seller, I would have gone back and asked when he was going to ship - or ask for my money back. If there was no response, I would then file a claim.

So my opinion is that there was a failure to communicate - by both of you.

Mike

[Jim Koepke]

"...ran out of boxes and was waiting for a new shipment."

Sounds like bad planing. Post Offices carry free flat rate priority mailing boxes. If he lives way out in the sticks, I can sympathize with his problem, but can not excuse his lack of business etiquette.

My practice is a bit different. In my listing is a note that I only get to town about once a week and my auctions end a day or two before we have plans to go to town. So pay up or wait a week. It is also my practice to respond when people pay, let them know my shipping plans and then send them an email after the package is in the hands of the Post Office.

There seems to have been a bit of a failure to communicate with the seller before complaining to ebay. There was also a failure from the sellers end for not keeping you informed of what was going on. I might have waited a few days and another email or two before filing a complaint.

Ebay has become a PITA to sell on. The seller fees on some items just takes too much out of any profit.

jtk

[Jerome Stanek]

He may be one of the people that order one price shipping boxes from the post office in bulk

[David Weaver]

If that was the case, he could just go to the PO and get more. Sometimes I get them to ship me boxes, and other times I just pick them up at the post office.

The seller usually states in the auction (whether they know it or not) that they will ship an item by a certain time. If they don't make that time and they don't communicate, they're a crappy seller.

[Scott Shepherd]

If that was the case, he could just go to the PO and get more. Sometimes I get them to ship me boxes, and other times I just pick them up at the post office.

None of our local post offices will give out boxes. They make you order them and you get them when you get them.

[David Weaver]

Wow...I guess I'm lucky. It's still not acceptable for a seller to miss their ship deadline because of poor planning on their part, and then on top of that, neglect to contact the buyer to notify them that they weren't sticking to the terms of the auction.

[Michael Weber]

Agreed a simple email should have been sent. One thing I miss from the old (new) days of ebay was that some personal exchange between buyer and seller was necessary. Now days it just totally anonymous except for the rare seller who actually emails after purchase. Who remembers having to send checks to pay for purchases by snail mail? Used to be more like a big garage sale with mostly personal items for sale.

[Steve Meliza]

Here's the crazy thing about selling something on eBay; you know when the auction ends, you know how much it weighs, you can box up the item in advance, you can assume most buyers will pay promptly with PayPal, and you can even use automated tools to accurately calculate the postage cost based on where the buyer is located. There is no excuse for a seller not to ship within a day or two of payment unless the listing says otherwise or something unexpected happens (family emergency or natural disaster). In those cases a seller is obligated (IMHO) to inform the buyer of the delay as soon as possible. In general you've got about 30 days from close of auction to initiate a request for eBay/PayPal to resolve an issue so don't fart around trying to be nice, just be reasonable, polite, and firm.

I recently had a seller who apparently couldn't ship the item to me for what he charged in the auction so he asked for some extra time to try to find a cheaper shipping option. I can empathize with under charging on shipping (been there) so I said to go ahead. A week later I had heard nothing and the item wasn't marked as shipped in eBay so I sent an email asking for the shipping status and got no reply, about 4 days later another email and no reply, a few days after that I filed with eBay saying that I'd not received the item and within an hour the guy responded in the eBay resolution system to say he'd shipped the item a few days prior. Sure enough, it arrived the next day so I closed the resolution ticket, no harm no foul, though the seller was mad at me for some reason as if I was the cause of the trouble for having won his auction.

This is similar to what happened with your plane so I'm not sure why you got refunded right away unless you filed your ticket differently than what I did or the seller may have messed up on his end and accidentally clicked an option to send a refund. Now that eBay owns PayPal and they are tightly integrated it doesn't take more than a little confusion on eBay and all of a sudden unintended things start happening to the money. Even if you did mess up the paperwork, the seller should have been more understanding and requested you make good on the payment again without getting all hot under the collar. What sucks is that the guy deserves neutral feedback at best, but if you were to leave less than positive feedback he'd retaliate and mar your record. And so the crummy seller goes on with 99% or better feedback rating.