Ebay to Walmart to ME.

Question

I ordered some lip balm from eBay seller one day and the next morning a car drove to my house and delivered it. The driver said he was from Walmart and the plastic sack said it was from Walmart. The item still show undelivered on the web site. Second time this has happened to me. Interesting, huh?

inceptions · Answer

Hi @newyorkalaska

You can report the buyer to eBay for dropshipping from Walmart (which is a policy violation( here:

https://www.ebay.com/help/action?topicid=4022

You can also leave appropriate feedback to warn other potential buyers.

eburtonlab · Answer

@newyorkalaska

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.