Let me start off by apologizing for the length of this but we felt it important enough to get out there and let other sellers know of this situation.
So, I would like to share a situation i recently encountered, i would also like to know if anyone else has experienced a situation like this.
I had a buyer purchase an item and immediately received an email requesting the item be shipped to a different address. I informed the buyer that we will only ship to addresses as provided by eBay and paypal, as stated in our listings. I asked the buyer to cancel their purchase and re purchase with corrected address. The buyer cancelled the purchase and we immediately refunded to the buyer.
Within a minutes, we received notification from paypal the buyer had made a purchase of the same item.
We checked our eBay account and there was no indication of a new purchase but there was a deposit into our paypal account from this buyer.
I called ebay, spoke with tier 1 customer service who looked into the situation and said that we were to contact our buyer and have them intern contact ebay to get the matter resolved, which we did immediately via ebay email. We heard nothing from ebay nor the buyer for several days. On the fifth day we received an email from our buyer demanding that we send out the item and guarantee shipping so the item would arrive within three days. We contacted ebay immediately and yet again explained the situation to the tier 1 rep. The rep tried to explain that we should have re-listed the item before the buyer re purchased it, i explained that this item had multiple quantities in the listing and could have just purchased from our current active listings, then went on to say that the buyer had paid ebay again but did not actually purchase the item the second time, our response ??????????
How does a buyer cancel a purchase receive a refund and then send payment to pay pal to purchase the same item? The ebay rep attempted to explain what had occurred but obviously could not so they just rambled on with some incoherent babble. At that point i explained to the rep that i was just going to refund the buyer from paypal and send a message explaining the situation, which i did while i still had ebay on the phone. It was then that a supervisor got on the line a proceeded to tell me that it would be ok for me to just ship the item to the customer outside of ebay, i told her that we were not comfortable with that because that is not within the "WRITTEN" SELLER PROTECTION GUIDELINES.
We went on to explain that we would assume the responsibility of proving the items delivery and the buyer could simply say at sometime in the future that they did not receive the item and even though we would be able to supply a tracking number, our eBay account would not show us actually shipping the item and we were not comfortable with this liability.
The supervisor then asked how i would like to resolve the situation, and i told her we had already sent an refund and an email to the buyer explaining the situation and wanted ebay to reimburse os for the lost sale and to send a message to our buyer explaining the situation as well and copy us on the message.
She said she could not copy us or provide us with the correspondence if any and would have to submit the reimbursement request. She was very persistence in trying to explain to me how a buyer could cancel and receive a refund for a item and then purchase the item on paypal and not showing up in our ebay account and again babbled on without really being able to provide an explanation.
Has anyone experienced this and if so please let us know as we believe this to be a important issue eBay needs to address.I explained to every rep i spoke with at eBay that while they all said that since the buyer sent me an email requesting to change the address, we could have shipped it to the new address the buyer provided. I explained that we are not comfortable with that because it does not comply with the current "WRITTEN" EBAY POLICIES and we know of multiple cases in which ebay verbally told a buyer something and then denied they ever said it. Which had actually happended to us several times over our time selling on ebay, and as a result we do not believe that anything verbally said would be credible.
Thank you all for taking the time to read this rather lengthy post but we feel this is a matter that deserves some immediate attention.
