Confirmed: New eBay Resolution Process Tilts Hard Towards Buyers

You know, I’m not sure if I’ve ever left another seller a negative feedback on eBay. I’ve been taken a few times as a buyer, but in the couple of incidents which standout the sellers were operating larger scans which led to them being NARU’ed before I had any chance to neg them.

Generally I’m pretty happy if I get what I thought I was getting in close to the described condition (always assuming an item is a little worse than described), with a pretty liberal interpretation of what’s a good delivery time–just get it to me.

I won a couple of lots at auction from a UK seller that I paid for back on June 27. Never came. Now this was a high feedback seller (around 10,000 FB) with a pretty outstanding overall record, and so deep down I’m pretty sure that they tried to do the right thing. But today’s September 28, pretty much exactly 3 months later and the items still aren’t here.

As a seller with similar stats myself this kind of puts me in a quandary as a buyer. I note buyer expectations this way: I paid for it, give me my stuff. As someone who knows what it takes to get your stuff to you, I know it’s often not this simple.

But at the same time, as a pretty small business here I can’t really afford to light a match to a $50 bill, which is about all that was involved here. So I guess my attitude would be best described as: I paid, I’ll wait, I’ll tap my toes some and whistle a little, just be sure you send it out so I get it eventually.

But, nope, still not here.

Now again, this item was shipping from the UK to the US, so I was willing to be more patient than usual. I wrote the seller after about a month and was politely asked for patience as such orders could sometimes take up to three months for delivery. Now this is pretty much BS, as I probably received about a dozen packages from the UK ordered after this one since that time, but I understand the game. It’s my own first move, an apology and a plea for patience, because the USPS generally gets it there. Lately I’ve been experiencing approximately 5-day delivery on items ordered from the UK. It’s pretty quick. These aren’t messages in a bottle anymore.

But I waited another month before writing back, in fact a few days over a month because I noticed the transactions had disappeared from my feedback area by this time and I had a feeling that I was pretty well screwed at this point. My guess is that the seller noticed it too as I didn’t receive a reply this time.

I waited a few more days, and honestly I was probably just going to let the whole thing drop, but then I had one of those days where the BS tasks were mounting: I was dealing with one difficult customer whose package had come back to me because they had the wrong address on file with eBay; another who had politely requested a return; and I received something not as described myself that I had to put in a refund request on. Lots of emails flying back and forth on this day, with me doing my best to be polite and reasonable to everyone, regardless of tone from the other side (and really only 1 of those 3 was a bad apple anyway).

So since a good portion of my day was pretty well shot, and the paperwork for the old undelivered UK transaction was attached to these other problem reports, I decided I may as well give one last shot at recooping my funds. I headed over to eBay’s Resolution Center, entered in one of the item numbers, and ooh, a form I hadn’t seen before popped up. I decided it was worth a few minutes to fill out.

Here are all of the questions on the new Resolution Request form:

Did you not receive the item or is there a problem with it?

Do you have the package tracking number?

Have you tried contacting the seller?

How did you contact the seller?

Did the seller respond?

Is the seller willing to resolve the issue or did they give you options? (enter details in next question)

Tell us what happened in your communication with the seller. Please be as detailed as possible since we will use this information to resolve your case.

How can eBay help you?

After submitting I was informed that they’d copy the seller on the request and work with me to get me my item or my money back.

eBay sent 2 follow-up emails asking how it was going. The second such email had a couple of big buttons asking whether or not things had been worked out. I clicked no, and was sent to a page showing this:

What the hell I figured, I called and was connected pretty quickly (under 5 minutes) to a very polite and well-spoken gentleman who asked for my eBay ID, the transaction number and some personal information. He asked if I’d paid through PayPal, which I did. He asked for my story, and I gave him the nuts and bolts of the above, to which he replied, “Oh, you’ve waited more than enough time, you should have your item,” and then something to the effect of “let’s get to work on getting your money back.”

Explaining the situation in further detail I told him that I still preferred the item to the refund and noting the seller’s high feedback number I explained that I really didn’t think he’d set out to rip me off, I just hadn’t received anything for my money yet. The customer service rep repeated that I’d waited long enough and asked for some info on my PayPal account.

We got right to the point of the refund when I interrupted: “Just a second. Again, I think this is a good seller on the whole, I’ve just had a bad experience. My doing this isn’t going to get him kicked off eBay or anything, is it?” The rep told me probably not. I explained that I was a seller myself and so I had some empathy in this situation. So I pushed a little more and asked, “It takes more than one of these to get you tossed off the site, doesn’t it?” He hemmed and hawed some giving me the general impression that while he either didn’t know for sure or wasn’t at liberty to say chances were that it’d take more than one of these black marks to ban the seller.

I had more questions, but honestly I felt A) I wasn’t going to receive this item and B) the seller dropped the ball not replying to my later email request, so rather than press forward with more and somehow talk myself out of this refund I gave permission for the rep to proceed. He told me it would take something like 5-7 business days for payment to arrive, but actually the money was in my PayPal account by the next morning.

Bright side, this was about a week ago and the seller is still active, so I don’t think I caused him any major trouble. My impression of this policy is that sellers are going to be buried a little with each such complaint before eventually being removed from the site.

But I’d like to know:
1. Who footed the bill for my refund? Did the seller pay or was this one of those cases eBay eluded to paying out themselves?
2. I said above, I don’t think I caused him any trouble, but did I? And just why is this particular policy, perhaps eBay’s most important policy, so loosely defined? I like to think it’s because they go on a case by case, buyer by buyer, seller by seller basis when sitting in judgment, but I didn’t get that feeling unless this CS rep had a magic button in front of him spitting out a bunch of stats I wasn’t privy too, which I doubt. It just felt too simple.
3. And so, is every buyer treated the same or if this ID had a history of contacting eBay with complaints would the process have gone differently?
4. While in this case I completely agree with the rep’s assessment that I had waited long enough, just what exactly is long enough?

For an excellent look at the new eBay Resolution process through the eyes of a buyer please see the blog post, E-Bay and Customer Service!, which was tweeted out earlier today by @SkipMcGrath and Re-Tweeted by @AuctionBytes. It presents the reaction that I presume eBay was looking for when implementing the new process. A very happy eBayer who congratulates the company on its treatment of him. It’s the correct assessment from the eyes of an honest buyer and I think we as seller’s need to understand that stories such as this are good for all of us.

But as a seller I just can’t help having a nagging feeling that I got my money back all too easily.

Update: This topic from yet another angle is covered by my friend Dan of magisterrex, who I recently interviewed about retro gaming on the VintageMeld, in his brand spankin’ new post How would you like to lose $770.10 on eBay? Check it out!