Buyer (with zero feedback–we all have to start somewhere, right?) purchases die cut batting from me ($30.99) and I ship it to Maine. Day after delivered return requested “disgusting dirty–cannot use” on a well-selling item that was brand new batting cut from the manufacturer’s bolt (trust me–not dirty). eBay charges me for a shipping label and item is returned from California the next day.
I received a small box (not the 12x12x4 item I sent) with one green jelly bean. Of course I opened a case for wrong item returned. Buyer gets their money back, funds are not taken from my account–except I do not get my shipping label money back. No, I am not going to spend any time chasing the label cost.
Sadly, yes, this is part of the eCommerce landscape, regardless of what platform you sell on. Amazon carries some of the blame, as they have incentivized this sort of behavior by forcing other platforms to follow them in customer capitulation, even in the face of blatant abuse, but some customers were lying, scheming, thieving jerks even before Amazon came around.
We could easily keep this discussion going with a discussion of what is this world coming to.
Or we could discuss how poor people are being driven to do desperate things to survive.
Or we could focus on how the big guys are dealing with greater “shrink” them we are.
On the whole, we can just accept the fact that there are thieves, always have been some thieves, and short of the second coming or some other dramatic change to life on earth, there will always be thieves.
A seller on the Amazon boards was just complaining that nearly all of his sales with bad outcomes are on Amazon, not his other venues. Amazon has cultivated an especially devious group of thieves.
If he appeals to exceptional low IQ buyers, it is easier for them to rip off Amazon sellers than sellers on sites where a room temperature IQ is required to run some ripoff.
I tend to prejudge what sellers who are perpetual victims of scammers are selling.
But when I started selling on Amazon, I offered a much wider selection of types of merchandise. Within a few months I eliminated many types of merchandise that I had previously sold on Ebay without many issues.
It was obvious how to avoid scamming buyers - DON’T BE STUPID.
Just because you can find items to sell does not mean you should sell them.
Sellers running the ship to phony address scam are currently thriving on Ebay. Since Ebay cannot access the address info on shipments other than zip code from the carriers, bogus empty packages are being sent to random addresses in the buyer’s zip.
I doubt if that complaining seller is going to point out that scam, I am surprised that I just did.
There is no AI fix, so if a buyer persists in being reimbursed for long enough, Ebay is making the refund. This could be an existential threat to online marketplaces.
I have contacted ebay support in cases like this (by phone) and they take care of it quickly.
Even had one customer return something just for buyers remorse (not allowed on the listing they purchased from) and ebay refunded the shipping charges to me. Buyer said “Dirty and unusable” showed ebay the pictures and they instantly agreed with me.
I don’t contact ebay often, but when I do, results!
I am still contemplating it’s potential as a magic bean and thus worthy of planting as suggested above . For now, it resides lonely in the box in which it arrived.
We’ve been getting combs and loose beads. We’ve started going through all of our eBay orders looking for accounts with certain indicators and cancelling them whenever possible and rerouting those we can’t cancel.
If it’s the same scam I’ve been dealing with it’s eBay dropshippers. All the returns with beads come from the same city. All the returns with combs come from a different city.
Update to the saga. Before I received the return request for the first package, I had received and shipped another order of the same item to another zero feedback buyer (I know, I know, but I wasn’t smart yet). That too resulted in a return of a junk item, this time several deflated balloons, again using the return label eBay purchased with my money.
Now that I am smarter, I have cancelled 2 more sales on the same listing by yet 2 more zero feedback buyers, and then just deleted the listing. I do not need any more headaches.