luckybob wrote:ebay wrote:You have to accept the buyer's return request if:
The item is damaged or doesn't match the listing description
The request falls within your return policy
THAT SAID, all the seller needs to do is to claim Artex broke it.
This doesn't work.
I've had sellers return things to me DESTROYED. I had one guy who used a shipping proxy in the US (about 100 miles from me, where I shipped his dual Xeon motherboard, CPUs and heatsinks) without telling me it was going to be repackaged and shipped to Singapore. I had a 15 day return on the listing. Ebay gives them 30 days (which means it doesn't matter what you say in your listing... no returns just means 30 days, you cannot deny returns). 43 days after I shipped the item (and it has been delivered to its destination 100 miles from me for WEEKS) I get a broken English message from this person saying the board is bent and they can't get it to work. Long story short, Paypal allowed them to ship it back to me (more on this later) and to my astonishment the box came destroyed with tons of international shipping labels on it, saying it went to Singapore and back. There was hardly any packing material in the box and the board (a Supermicro X7DCA-L) was completely destroyed.
I thought "well this sucks but there's no way eBay is going to side with them, since I have so much evidence"... well, it wasn't up to eBay since it was outside the 30 days anyway. It was entirely up to Paypal who is directly connected with eBay, which means the 30 day ebay return period is actually also meaningless and is in fact 180 days, no matter what the seller does or says. In the end, they completely sided with the buyer for no apparent reason, despite the fact that it was beyond both return periods (mine and the eBays) and they lied to me about the destination AND had someone else tamper it with before shipping it again. All totally out of my hands. They put a hold on the ~$150 or so on my Paypal account and I actually let my balance stay that way for several months before caving and paying it from my checking account due to NEEDING paypal for something. Now, I use Mercari and message boards for sales. I'm done with eBay for anything but scrap lots. Its simply not worth the stress of having 180 days to get ripped off after every purchase I make.
I also had another transaction where I sold a Geforce GTX 680M MXM card. I got it cheap and it came in a box, but I had no way to test it. So I listed it for the going-rate at the time, saying it appeared to be new but I had no way to test it, so I would accept returns if it didn't work as long as it was returned in the same condition in which it was sent. Someone bought it immediately (nearly $300), when they got it, they said it didn't work, so they shipped it back. When I got it, it was completely destroyed. They kept lying to me and making up stories as to what joker of a computer tech tested it, what kind of laptop they tried to install it in, how exactly they hooked it up, IF they used thermal paste or IF they even used a cooler at all. The GPU die was cracked in 4 places and it was obvious they used no thermal paste or pad. They acted completely offended that I was upset about them destroying something and trying to act like it was part of my return policy. Needless to say, eBay only NEEDS buyers, so they sided with the buyer yet again. There will always be sellers, because we live in a society with a massive overabundance of crap to sell, and where else are people going to go?
Yeah, I buy on eBay all the time, but I can't sell anything functional on there anymore. No way. I also make sure that all of my Paypal sales are paid as gifts. If my return policy and my reputation aren't good enough then people can go to eBay, pay eBay prices and have a Paypal's 180-day "we steal money out of the pockets of honest sellers" guarantee.
/rant
