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Bait and switch sellers from China.
Lately I've run into several sellers from China who offer items then when I buy it now, they come back in a day or two with some story and ask me to cancel the order. Then they update the auction with a higher price. On one occasion the seller was able to cancel the order and listed it as I wanted to cancel.
Has anybody else run into this. Thanks RobB
2 comments
eburtonlab
Mentor8 months ago@blue6770
If that is a scam it is a poor one that does not seem to benefit the scammer.
Possibly what you are encountering are sellers that are engaged in retail drop shipping. Incompetent drop shipping sellers on eBay may not keep track of price increases and may find themselves unable to obtain their items at the price they had planned for when it becomes time to fulfill an order.
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.
inceptions
Mentor8 months agoHi @blue6770
Yes, the boards are full of posts from sellers located in China that scam their buyers.
On the search results page, you can customize the page to shown the seller's feedback. The seller's item location is also displayed (however their country of registration is not and one of the scams is to misrepresent the item location. That will save you time clicking on listings you don't want to consider.
To avoid these sellers, go to the their full feedback page and check the country of registration. Unless they have a long history of selling a lot of items with at least 99.9% positive feedback, I would think twice before buying.