"Untested" in eBayland usually means "broken".

kixs wrote:

ZellSF wrote:

AtTheGates wrote:

It's pretty well known that eBay pretty much ALWAYS sides with the buyer. This sounds very unusual.

Well it is very possible OP isn't giving us the full story here either.

No. I've told as it is without giving any personal or item details.

I've done some reading of eBay.de policies and it is written that the buyer must prove it doesn't work. Damn... I got two other non-functional cards, but payed with Bank transfer. The sellers are again acting like 5 year olds... they don't care if I payed for a functional item that doesn't work! Never again!!! Damn Germans!!! In all this years I've had good experiences and we have always come to some reasonable solution. But now... I just don't understand. I guess I'm being too naive... and losing around 150€.

I have also had very few issues over the years (except with sellers packaging stuff like potato) but over the last 6 months things have gotten so bad that I'm tempted to totally give up on Ebay altogether.

One example was the seller who first diddn't ship the motherboard I had won at all. Then after a month of made up excuses the seller just stuffed the board in a big brown envelope without protection and shipped it as an untracked letter eventhough I had paid for tracked shipping...

When the board arrived damaged the seller first refused to take any resposability claiming the postal workers were at fault but after I opened a case with Ebay he finally agreed to a partial refund. The refund got registered by Ebay and it said "pending" in my Paypal transaction history, I thought everything was alright. When I checked a few days later the refund was still listed as pending and after two weeks that changed to cancelled. The seller had obviously emptied his Paypal connected bank account but Ebay still had the refund listed as completed and Paypal would not get involved as it was an "Ebay matter"... This took some effort to sort out and the fact that I was on a small Greek island with Internet connection slow enough to make it seem like the whole island shared a 28.8 kbps dial up modem made it a really frustrating experience.

In the end Ebay actually paid up.

I have had some issues with about half of my purchases over the summer and in many cases where I could not fix the item my self I have not even bothered to fight for my money as the sums involved havn't been large enough to warrant the effort. I find returning stuff only worth it if the money I have paid is substantially more than I make in two hours as that is the least time I will spend on arguing with the seller (and perhaps Ebay), packaging the item and taking it to the post office. As I'm from Sweden and shopping through Ebay.de or Ebay.co.uk there are no pre paid Ebay return labels available. If I'm going to be able to prove that I have actually returned the faulty item I have to get the seller to pay for tracked shipping which for some reason costs the double in Sweden compared to Germany.

Whats happening is basically that ebay has sabotaged its own feedback system. This days, sellers can't give a negative vote to buyers anymore, and as a buyer the situation is not much better: to leave a negative vote you have to go through three or four disclaimers, and even a neutral vote is frowned upon, and most of the times the seller can have the negative vote removed just by complaining; the ebay feedback system now is basically rigged to allow only positive votes because that's how the big stores (that this days represent more than 90% of ebay business) want it.