Back on March 23rd I mentioned that I’d sold a few things on eBay, and that one of the items was a rather high-end motherboard. Then on April 3rd the fellow who bought the motherboard couldn’t get it to work and requested eBay refund his money.
I responded to his request with an attempt to help him get it set up, because it’s a pretty advanced board and really punishes you for not reading the manual. That and I know the board worked fine – unless he blew it up by not reading the manual.
And got no response.
eBay essentially offers three responses to a refund request; send a message, refund the item, or ask eBay to arbitrate things. And it’s all on a timer, in this case the 8th, with the default being eBay arbitrating.
Well, given the buyer’s radio silence I assumed he was just expecting me to refund his money and wouldn’t respond to my suggestions in the hopes eBay would judge in his favor when the clock ran out.
So I decided to just sit and wait; the 8th came and went with no response and I started to wonder what was up.
This morning I got a series of emails from eBay. The first, at 07:57, stated the buyer had asked them to arbitrate and that they would review things and that it would take 48 hours.
I kind of expected this.
At 08:00 the next email comes in stating that eBay had judged in favor of the buyer and that the buyer would be sending the board back to me by the 22nd. eBay would then bill me for the purchase price as well as the return shipping…
That was a surprisingly quick 48 hours, but I kind of expected this as well. I figured I’d deal with the bank stuff and move the $650 into the eBay account after breakfast…
Then another email arrived at 08:10. This one was the buyer finally responding stating that he got the board working and that he was closing the return request.
…
So, I spent a week fretting over all of this for no particular reason other than someone neglecting their email.
Anyway, long story short, I’ll never sell anything on eBay again… It’s stupidly expensive to sell things on the platform and the robojudge makes it shockingly easy for people to mess with you.
I’m sure I will continue buying things there just because it’s a handy source for bits and pieces of the past that cannot be found elsewhere.
Lesson learned, and I got lucky this time in that it didn’t cost me anything but a hundred dollars in fees and shipping.
Listening to "Subdivisions" by Rush