I don’t generally buy or sell from eBay Inc. (NasdaqGS: EBAY) and have done so only on a limited basis over the past 12 years since I started my account. Generally I would buy an item or a part I needed from someone who had it at a great price.  I personally never complained about anyone. I just did the transaction and accepted whatever came. Mostly the experiences were okay.

A NOTE: EBAY IS AS DEDICATED TO BLOCKING SCAMS AS YOU ARE DEDICATED TO AVOIDING THEM!

Don’t forget that eBay is not the problem here. It is people doing small time scams using the “eBay rules” to help them. I share this so we can all write to eBay and complain about it. That is when they will start making changes!

UPDATE: PayPal is no longer owned by eBay, buy eBay still requires it as a payment method (for now). 

 

 

The Risks Involved in Selling Big Ticket Items:

Selling is where the real risk comes in I have found. I had a number of Apple laptops to sell. They were related to another business of mine where we did some upgrades. I sold off about six working laptops and even one non-working laptop.  I did not want to sell them locally and arrange meeting strangers in strange places to show them off. Seriously I just wanted to get a fair price, sell them, ship them and never hear about them again.

 

Where the scamming starts:

I already knew that selling out of the country is ultra high risk as there are very few ways of getting tracking from Point A (the seller) to Point B (the buyer) in another country. Without tracking there is a huge chance they will say “I didn’t get it.”  Luckily I did not sell out of the country.

What happened to me is a simple buyer challenge can cause you to have funds frozen in your linked PayPal account and eventually swiped from your linked credit card or bank account. You think you are selling “as is with no returns.”  You are very wrong. Like the outside world where “everything is negotiable” so is the case on Ebay. They call it “the “partial refund” scam. Remember I said I sold a non-working Apple laptop?  It sold for $305 plus $23 shipping. I sold with pictures of top, bottom, open, and even with the bottom panel off to reveal the insides. They buyer wanted to return it because it was “not pristine.” He claimed there were dints that were not there when I sold it to him. He did not want to return it.  Just get an adjustment in price. You know, a partial refund. The only reason he did not win that one was that he made me an early offer in a presell question through Ebay’s system telling me that he wants to do the deal outside of Ebay in PayPal, suggesting that I cancel the listing and he would pay me direct. Once I put that in the first line of my reply back, he backed down. I hope he can fix the dints he added to the laptop.  Likely he needed parts from the inside and was scamming me to help him lower his overall costs. Or he sent me a picture of a different laptop.

Then another one put in a refund request. It was because the battery on a 2009 MacBook Air did not hold a charge very well. It was also because he had trouble connecting to the Mac App Store with his login. Guess what, batteries are not really that great after about five years. That’s why he should just spend about $50 and get another one.  His trouble with the Mac App Store was he had too many Macs linked to his account and he had to unlink one to get to his iTunes music. Many people get rid of earlier Macs but do not deauthorize them. Ultimately he backed off of his refund request. I guess he was able to deauthorize an earlier Mac and make it work.

UPDATE: OCTOBER 27, 2015:

Not included in this was yet another buyer who had one of the working laptops for about 11 months and asked if he could return it.  He sent just one request and I ignored it. Keep in mind that the official policy is now NINE MONTHS to challenge a sale. Someone can have a product and challenge a sale up to nine months later. One of the automatics is to say the goods are “counterfeit” or otherwise fake. The seller could easily lose even nine  months later. (End of update.)

What I learned from all of this is that I am very lucky that all of my other buyers have held firm. I did not realize they can come back weeks after a buy and still make a request.  I have about $4000 in total sales out there, and I am certainly hoping not to see anymore negative charges on my PayPal account. Ultimately I am done with selling on Ebay. I read extensively about Ebay buyer scams and really learned a lot.

 

Popular Buyer Scams:

Let’s talk about some of the popular buyer scams. First let me preface this with a couple of comments. Ebay has a successful market place where items tend to get the top dollar possible when compared to other methods.  Generally it is a far safer way to sell when compared to Craigslist.org. There are holes in the system that favor the buyer too much of the time.  These can be financially devastating to sellers.

Here are some of those scams:

Selling “name brand” items like Rolex and top name woman’s purses to overseas buyers. Primarily I read about these items shipped to Europe. What happens is the buyer claims they are “fake.” These supposed non-genuine items are then turned over to police authorities, custom agents, etc., and then a refund request is issued with an attached police report. Fakes are never returned by authorities, and some sellers can even have charges brought against them by those distant law enforcement authorities. But what two sellers reported was that the items turned over as fakes were NOT the items they shipped to the buyers. One seller who sold a Rolex for $5000 claims that the person that did it has an extensive police record in his own locale. Ebay ruled in favor, according to these sellers, of the buyer. Refunds issued. Sellers out big dollars.

Buying parts to replace non-working parts on Ebay. A car alternator seller says he is getting removed alternators back when people buy working alternators. They simply clean the one they pull out and send it back as if the one he sold them was not working. Extensive pictures apparently don’t work as they simply claim the alternator in the picture was not the one they received. This is also done for computer components like hard drives. Sometimes they return different brands claiming the seller sent them the wrong one in the first place.

Sellers on Ebay are required to accept PayPal.  This one I read about several times. They buyer complains about an Ebay purchase on PayPal and asks for a refund there. They contact you by normal email, too. Then they contact you to ask you to process the refund via Ebay.  You agree. You process the refund in Ebay, and they share email correspondence where you agreed to a refund with PayPal.  These sellers claim that the buyers can time it just right to get a refund issued through Ebay and a reversal of the transaction in PayPal.  The solution here is to never respond to a buyer on regular email. Even if they email you direct, don’t allow for it. They get your email on the final order printout and in the PayPal transaction. If they open a complaint in PayPal and Ebay, make note of it in your replies to PayPal and Ebay that the buyer is trying to get refunds via both services. This sounds absurd, but I read of several that managed to do this in the Ebay forums.

Brazil is said to occasionally hold products to be delivered in customs for up to a month before allowing them to go on to their destination. In the mean time you only have a tracking number and an estimated delivery date. Brazilians are notorious for requesting refunds while it is on hold, and getting those refunds because the tracking shows it undelivered and past the due date. One person even claimed that the original non-delivery refund request was started the day after purchase and was processed as legitimate with a refund issued the day after the package was due. They all claim that the package eventually left customs and were delivered and confirmed – only after a refund was processed. And these could not be challenged.

Buy, use and return scam. This is the typical prom dress returned, camera for vacation, or similar use of a product that is later returned. They make some dubious claim and you accept the return.

There are so many of these, and most of them are not at all the fault of Ebay.  It’s just the way it goes.