Ebay actually stood up for me as a seller today!

[fohat.digs]

I will give them credit and thanks.

A nutball woman bought one of my EPDM keyboard mats, the XL size (at a price that was really too low, I have since raised the prices on the large sizes a couple of dollars because I realized that there was almost enough material there to make 4 of the little ones and also because they are heavy and postage has gone up).

After no response or feedback for almost 2 weeks, she opened a complaint with ebay asking for a return because she said that the product was defective - ie that I had used the term "non-slip" and that her keyboard still slid around.

I agreed to the return and fronted her the postage (ebay dinged me for an additional $7.05 even though the total purchase price including free shipping had been only $14). But whatever, I was not just going to give her a full refund and let her keep the mat.

Today I received the mat as shown below, along with the attached note. Naturally she had said nothing about chopping the mat into 3 sloppy pieces when she made the complaint to ebay.

When I took it to customer service, they quickly found in my favor and refunded my money. (that is, purchase price (which they had placed on hold) and return shipping)

I almost feel sorry for her being such a moron, but her dishonesty is worse because what she did was pretty ****ty. If she had just had the decency to admit that she had chopped it up, I would have given her a partial refund (probably half) and let her keep the pieces. The only reason I wanted it back was because it was such a nice big piece and they are harder to get than the smaller ones.

So, she ended up paying the $14 purchase price, plus the $7 fraudulent return postage, and she has nothing to show for it.
Hopefully she will learn a lesson in decency, but she will probably just tell her friends that she got screwed on that awful ebay.

PS - if you want one, go through Artisan Services here for a cheaper price
https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=59308.0

[tp4tissue]

TIL  fohat sells defective mats on ebay..

[SpAmRaY]

Wonder if it was somebody here??

[fohat.digs]

TIL  fohat sells defective mats on ebay.

I changed the ebay descriptions and replaced the term "non-slip" with the word "protective"

[yookwh]

I remember when a buyer tried to return a product and only gave a bubbled envelope with nothing inside. Thankfully, idiots like him and the one you mentioned will always have a good chance of getting their privileges pulled away from them by eBay. Unfortunately, there are more keen scammers out there who use eBay's still-ludicrous return policies to their favors. The day I experience that is the day I pull out of eBay (Although I've heard that Amazon is not much better)

[fohat.digs]

I remember when a buyer tried to return a product and only gave a bubbled envelope with nothing inside.

How did you overcome the "he-said-she-said" argument with ebay "customer care"?

[yookwh]

At the time, I had a substantially higher feedback rating than the buyer (200+ compared to his/her 5, lol). I think this was a rare case scenario. But if you ever have this come up again with a user with higher feedback, you must have already had sent this thing out with signature confirmation, tracking, and the likes.

I had the same thing happen with a user with 100+ feedback, though this time he had placed styrofoam in the box to replicate the weight. I went to eBay straight away, told the customer rep my history with the site (I've been a user for 7 years), my feedback history with customers, and the fact that I had sent the item to the buyer with all of the aforementioned credentials, while he only sent it back with a stamp.

Will there eventually be a point where a buyer can bypass all this and carefully manipulate the system to scam you? Yes, and I've seen that first hand. But that's a very small percentage of buyers, and for a small market on the site (Mainly electronics - computers, iPads, etc.). You just have to be aware of what's going on, and you'll 99% of the time not run into these people.

[fohat.digs]

a buyer can bypass all this and carefully manipulate the system to scam you?

The very simple way is to simply say that you never received it, even if you did.

At that point, the money is sucked out of the seller's account and given to the buyer, and the seller has the enormous burden of proving his case and collecting some sort of insurance settlement, which rarely includes the shipping cost anyway.

And in recent years, ebay has made it impossible for sellers to leave negative feedback on buyers, so there is little "check and balance" left in the system.