I would think very carefully before ordering anything off E Bay worth more than about £10…
But has anyone else had a similar experience with any other retailer ?
What would Amazon have done (for a 3rd party seller) ?
I ordered some stuff off an E Bay seller, total price about £82. The seller dispatched it all together but UNSIGNED for (on an £82 order ! ).
The Evri driver happened to call at the weekend when my shop is shut and left the parcel (quite a big one) in the UNLOCKED porch. By defintion it was unlocked because he was able to get into it ! It was also unsafe because my shop is on a busy road and right next to a fairly busy bus stop…
The parcel went missing but the seller is not prepared to do anything because he has the tracking picture of it in the porch. In my view he has a case for a dispute with the carrier but that is nothing to do with me.
I appealed to E Bay and it was rejected because :
“the tracking information provided by the seller shows that the item was successfully delivered at Sheffield South Yorkshire. As per our policy, once the item has been delivered to the buyer’s address, the case will be closed.”
There are four parties to this nightmare :
1 - The seller
2 - The carrier
3 - E bay
4 - Me, the buyer
The seller should not have sent out an £82 order with no signature required (almost unbelievably Evri only charge an extra 60p (sixty pence !) for a signature).
The carrier should not have left the order in an unsafe place.
E Bay should not be leaving their customers in the lurch and out of pocket.
The only one who has done nothing wrong is me, and yet I am losing £82, EIGHTY TWO POUNDS !
I was not given the option to do that.
My business is (mostly) mail order, and we were talking about this yesterday. My colleague puts some of the blame on the driver but most on the seller.
It is all about the value of the item. It is not worth going to the expense and trouble (for the buyer) of requiring a signature if the product is only worth, say, £5.
But no mail order seller should be sending out orders “unsigned for” if he is not prepared to cover the loss.
Most of our orders go out DX and are signed for unless the customer specifically requests (in writing) to, for instance, “leave it in the green bin round the back if nobody in”. Incidentally, buyers should only ever do that if they are prepared to cover the loss if something goes wrong !
Some smaller items would go out Royal Mail but even they are tracked when delivered.
I bought hundreds on items on eBay. I use seller with 100% or near a damn it. I buy it all with PayPal for the integrated protection that comes with it. I even got a refund on a counterfeit KMC chain without too much hassle from a business seller.
There is inherent risk in buying anything from the Internet that isn’t ‘signed for’, but don’t we accept that in general?
That is a very good point, 100% and the 98.6% he had are not the same thing.
I can remember years ago getting getting bad service from an E Bay seller (a wooden railway point warped after 4 months) and a post on the E Bay community forum made that very point, correctly as it turned out because that seller had about 98% positive feedback but his customer service was crap. More to the point, it was crap once the 3 month window for feedback had passed.
I am very cynical about E Bay, I never buy anything off E Bay where I want a warranty over the three months feedback limit. My experience is that sellers are not interested once it is too late to give bad feedback. As it happens the Birmingham based blinds seller (awesome alliteration !) wasn’t even bothered about bad feedback within the three months, that’s how crap his customer service is !
I used to buy loads on there, but oddly not so much in the last 6 months or so. Possibly because I haven’t really bought much for myself; other than a s/h Kayak, which was a lot, but from FB Marketplace.
It’s great for getting stuff like aftermarket batteries for Dyson vaccum cleaners and the like.
No, If I put an order in I expect to get it, and if I do not that is, or should be, the responsibility of the seller.
The bottom line here is no seller should send anything out unsigned for if they are not prepared to cover the cost of a replacement !
I am really surprised at E Bay though, normally they bend over backwards to take the side of the buyer. It has shaken my faith in the brand.
I don’t think I’ve ever had a bad experience of buying and selling stuff on eBay over the years. I tend to only use it for buying low value items these days as many sellers can beat the prices offered by the Bezos tat bazarre and including postage.
Have sold some expensive stuff as well - usually older IT or suchlike - but only one buyer complained about something not working correctly but I told him to jog on as it was working fine when I shipped it and it was securely packed. Think he was just fishing for a refund and he didn’t follow up.
I still buy plenty of things on ebay and take a similar view to gambling, I never spend more than I can afford to lose, very few issues with anything I’ve bought.
However, I have given up selling after a couple of bad experiences:
Sold a petrol radio controlled car as spares or repair. Said it was fine last time I used it but had sat in shed for years so didn’t want to commit to it being OK. Lad from Wrexham bought it then started abusing me because he said his local shop said the engine needed rebuilding. I pointed out it was spares or repair but he said he was coming down from Wrexham to “do me” (He never did)
I also sold a small lathe/milling machine - older guy came to collect it, I showed it him working and all the controls and he went away happy, as far as I knew. A couple fo days later he started messaging me asking how you hold work down when using the milling machine so I told him he need to buy the appropriate t-nuts and clamps, depending what he was trying to hold. At this point he told it wasn’t fit for sale as couldn’t be used without those. I said that was like saying a cooker is unfit for sale without pots and pans but he kept going on for days so I ended up refunding him £50 to buy some clamps and telling him to never contact me again, which he didn’t. I think he regretted buying it and was looking for an excuse to return it, I did get more than I expected so wasn’t that bothered about the £50.
They both left a bad taste in my mouth and put me off, which is a shame as I have loads of stuff I’d like to get rid of but can’t be arsed with the aggro.
Speaking as a mail order seller (not through E Bay) I have always assumed “signed for” was to protect the seller not the buyer ! i.e. it is for the seller has to prove the buyer has received the goods…
I bought a set of samurai swords on Ebay when drunk as a student in about 2004 or so. They never turned up, and being a drunk lazy student I didn’t bother chasing. Tbohgh I think they were about 50 quid, which was a lot back then.
I think we can all agree it was probably for the best though!
Not really related apart from the ebay link but some massive prick I used to work with got scammed on ebay and I still chuckle about it now.
It was about 15/16 years ago and PS3s were relatively new out. He’d bought one and decided he didn’t really want it so he put it on ebay. It sold for slightly more than he paid so he was walking around the office telling anyone who would listen that he’d made money on it, as if he was on the verge of becoming a millionaire.
Buyer pays by Paypal but as we were in Central London they kindly offered to save him the hassle of having to post it by meeting him in his lunch break.
He didn’t really mention anything about meeting them apart from that he thought it was odd that a couple if London yoots were in the city.
About 10 days later he goes ape shit when he was sat at his desk as the buyers had put in a non deliver claim against the transaction. As he couldn’t prove that he had sent it ebay / paypal refunded them.
I really shouldn’t have laughed about it then or still be laughing about it now, its just ine of those funny things in life that sticks with you.
