Avoiding Amazon

Question

I often order here on EBay, with good success. However...

sometimes the package arrives from Amazon, when I ordered it from the individual identified by EBay as the seller. I don't want to give any money to Bezos, and I don't want folks I'm doing business with misrepresenting themselves.

How can this message find its way to relevant management?

eburtonlab · Answer

@donse62

Sellers that are willing to violate eBay and Amazon policy by fulfilling eBay orders by placing a retail order on Amazon will go to great lengths to hide what they are doing from eBay, Amazon and their buyers, regardless of what eBay does.

It may not be possible to always identify in advance those sellers who drop-ship, but it is possible to identify some common characteristics of illicit retail drop-shippers or other under-performing sellers, and thus avoid the worst of them.

Often they can be spotted by a combination of low feedback number, free shipping of heavy items where it would not be profitable to use retail shipping, use of stock photos, high handling time (not necessarily if they are using Amazon or Walmart, though), poor feedback received with complaints of delays and wrong items or out of stock cancellations, very odd item selection and/or quantities like items were chosen at random from a catalog, canned item descriptions scraped from another site that exactly match many other similar listings, differences between registration location on the feedback page and item location (or vague item location -- like "US, United States"), or inability to answer even basic questions about the items being sold.