Emailing ebay

dern

Is there any way to email ebay to register a complaint? I sold a guitar on ebay, the customer picked it up (or his courier did) and they are withholding payment. The online chat guy just copied and pasted stuff from their website.

Thanks,

Mark

Arktik83

dern said:

Is there any way to email ebay to register a complaint? I sold a guitar on ebay, the customer picked it up (or his courier did) and they are withholding payment. The online chat guy just copied and pasted stuff from their website.

Thanks,

Mark

Have you tried calling them or getting them to call you?  I did that recently and they were pretty helpful.  Hope you manage to get it sorted!

dern

I'll give that a go, thanks.

Feel pretty aggrieved as the buyer has my guitar and is happy with it and they won't give me my money because I have sold less than 25 items. Honest to god this dipshit sent this to me...

"We put this program in place to help protect the eBay community. Because newer sellers might not be aware of the best practices for making their buyers happy, we like to give them a little more experience before we make their funds available right after a sale."

Eh? He's got the guitar and likes it.

Idiots.

TTony

You let the buyer arrange his own courier???

cacophony

long story but i got shafted by a buyer, i e-mailed e-bay. may as well not have bothered, they didn`t even bother to respond to my individual complaint, sent me an automated reply that basically said "f**k off". any further questions or whatever i sent were just ignored.

dern

Yes, not a good idea?

Anyway, paypal (or ebay) have the funds, it's not that he hasn't paid.

leerocker

dern said:

Yes, not a good idea?

Anyway, paypal (or ebay) have the funds, it's not that he hasn't paid.

i think once the buyer leaves you feedback paypal release the funds

chrispy108

dern;972861" said:

Yes, not a good idea?

Anyway, paypal (or ebay) have the funds, it's not that he hasn't paid.

No, because you've got no proof it was sent.

It's for you to get your item safely to the buyer.

Why not phone them?

TTony

dern said:

Yes, not a good idea?

Not a good idea, in fact, a bad idea.

If the buyer arranges the courier, he has the contract with the courier, rather than you.  As the contract holder, the courier will send him the proof of delivery, not you.  You have no way of proving that an item was collected and certainly no way of proving that it was delivered.

The buyer may well have paid you, but can then claim that you didn't send the item, or that it never arrived, and you've got no way of proving otherwise.  He then submits a claim to have his payment refunded, and you don't need to guess how that would work out.

In this specific instance, you've said that the buyer has the guitar and is happy with it, so as long as that's on some sort of verifiable medium (eg an email from the same account as he has registered to his eBay & PayPal accounts), don't start to panic, but don't do it again!!

dern

Ok, cheers. Would be annoying if it fell through but not the end of the world.

Cheers all.

Mark

PS. Still annoyed at ebay

Bygone_Tones

I have contacted ebay several times over the years. The key to getting through to them is persistence. They will always fob you off with the standard response nonsense in the beginning, but just dont give up and they will wake up and respond properly once they know you are not going away.

Ive even got them to remove negative feedbacks that were unfairly left, and I once had a long conversation with one guy on the chat about how ebay was going down the pan and they would not be around 10 years from now because of the way they treat their sellers. I knew I wasnt going to change anything about ebay, but I got to have my say and it felt good to know someone at ebay was actually listening to my opinions, and didnt just close down the chat when my rant started.

Winny_Pooh

If you have little feedback as a seller then this is just for the buyer's protection. Its pretty standard policy and if nothing goes amiss you will get your money later. 

It's annoying, but if Ebay's focus is the buyer then I can see the logic. Confirm with the buyer that he has left feedback and contact Paypal by phone (not ebay)

Teetonetal

I do find it odd that ebay is so heavily skewed to the buyer these days, yet all the money comes via the sellers. You do wonder how long it will be before the sellers dry up?

JezWynd

Teetonetal said:

I do find it odd that ebay is so heavily skewed to the buyer these days, yet all the money comes via the sellers. You do wonder how long it will be before the sellers dry up?

That is weird isn't it. I've mostly given up using eBay;  as a seller I've been treated okay but I've had a couple of instances recently where items I purchased were revealed to have faults some weeks later - I sense people are using it as a dumping ground for their trash.

Winny_Pooh

Consumers will always have an edge as Ebay is in effect a storefront. Buyers getting ripped off is newsworthy, not sellers. I dont think ebay is perfect in their manner with sellers but as a big corporate entity I can see their logic.

Cirrus

Thing is no matter how much they screw with sellers, it's the buyers that will keep the website afloat - where there's a large buying user base, there will always be sellers prepared to deal with a certain amount of shit and unfair practices to reach that user base. In fact when eBay started changing their rules to favour buyers, I remember talk that it was a deliberate shift to favour big sellers - companies who could afford to put up with the bullshit - and move away from the 'garage sale on the internet' model with which eBay made its name.

chrispy108

Phone them http://pages.ebay.co.uk/help/account/contact-customer-support.html

You aren't a teenage boy calling a girls landline scared her dad will answer are you?