Just letting off steam

After laughing at MA's recent love-letter post I thought I'd relate a recent experience of my own.

Just before Xmas (December19th to be precise) I foound, bought and paid for a non standard replacement power supply for a client's Gateway pc. The old pre bankruptcy Gateway. These are hard to get but it was a 'buy it now' price on Ebay. The only choice of carrier was next day. I paid within 30 seconds.

Foolishly I also told the client that his pc would now be ready before Xmas.

After a week of no delivery I nudged the supplier with a friendly Email.
No reply.
Tried again a couple of times, asked for a phone number and offered mine to discuss.
No reply.

Finally started legal proceedings and Ebay temporarily suspended the supplier.
PayPay has just returned my money. The supplier was then reinstated

And the first action of the (non) supplier was to give me negative feedback!

It's a great pity as I hadn't used him before and he seemed to supply lots of parts I need. Looking back over his feedback, most transactions go well, but about 1 in 30 go wrong and he reacts similarly to others.

In the meantime I found what I needed elsewhere.

 

good to hear at least you got your money back..

i have never used ebay but i have a friend who has virtually made a buisness out of it. be interesting to know how often that happings where the stuff you buy just doesn't turn up:confused i think in the 3 years he has been on ebay it has never happened to him...

 

You see many of those 'didn't respond to email' on EBAY,I think a lot of problems may be due peoples Spam boxes blocking new emails.

 

You can't block Ebay's own message system! He did reply to those abusively. Why be abusive to a customer?

I could happily just write if off and never deal with him again but what got me was that I had to apologise to my customer. And I had nearly a month's delay wondering if he was going to supply or not when all it needed was a simple phone call "sorry we can't supply after all"

 

I've bought several things off eBay, and only had a few problems. It was my wife who had the big problem. She bought something intended to be a Christmas present for me - it was around $250.00!!! It was never delivered, and the seller would never respond to e-mails. We did get the cash back via paypal, finally. I believe the seller has vanished from eBay.

I had a problem once with a long delivery time - but the item was finally sent, albiet VERY late.

With hers, she bought off a seller who had been a member for only a few months, and had sold nothing . . . I told her not to do that for such a high-dollar amount. In my case, the seller had been a member for a while and had decent feed-back. I guess it's a risk, no matter how careful you are. At least when paying by paypal you can get your cash back - but you gotta keep the aggravation and inconvenience it caused you . . .

 

It sucks when you come across someone so unprofessional...and as the saying goes: Caveat emptor (Latin for "Let the buyer beware").

As for your client, I'm sure he would have accepted your simple explanation...it isn't as though you were slacking off, and your information was reasonably based with receipt time frame expectation.

 

Well I didn't know that!I've only used EBAY passively my brothers constantly using my computer to check his auctions,he's never had a problem yet but I don't think he's used any private sellers just EBAY stores where they'll bend over backwards to get good feedback.