I think this is a case of buyer fraud. I have been selling on eBay for close to 20 years and Ebay NEVER sides with the seller. So who is actually paying eBay. Not the buyers for sure. My most recent case is a silver glass apothecary jar that has two pieces. Top and bottom. I shipped the item in a styrofoam cooler with walls that are 3 inches thick. The apothecary jar was wrapped in bubble wrap and also padded inside the cooler with egg crates. She said the bottom was broken. I told her that we would require a return of the merchandise, and that we had instituted a new way of marking our original merchandise, because people had pulled some fast ones on us in the past. I have used that response on buyers in the past with very suspicious return breakage requests. I never heard from them some of them again, which pretty much means that they were trying to return a broken identical item and switch it out. Well this buyer got snotty with me and said that I was inferring that she was not truthful. I told her that that was not my intention at all, and agreed to refund her money. She then got nice with me, and told me that she had been looking for a while for this item, and that she had broken hers last year. Now I really am suspicious. It is insured with UPS, but I have to take time out of my busy days to file a claim with them that I pretty much suspect is bogus. Plus, this is defrauding UPS. What are we going to do about this? With eBay fees getting out of control (I sold a few items for $199 and they took close to $33 for fees), I am seriously thinking of taking all of my listings down and calling it quits.
