The situation was that we were working with the seller who gave us no indication that she was going to do what she is now doing. Ebay strongly encourages us, as buyers, to work things out with sellers and we have never had any real issues when doing so in the past.
My son gave the seller the time she requested and we didn't realize that that time also magically coincided with eBay's automated system closing the case with no recourse to do anything about it.
I have little use or interest in "fault" and thanks especially to sapphire_studio's clarifications on things we definitely know better going forward. In the future we will keep sellers on a much shorter leash and absolutely will not be extending them the grace that we have in the past and, in general, feel compelled to believe is the best way to behave, in life.
And, again, if I as a customer cannot trust the businesses I am doing business with, whether eBay or an eBay seller, then I will not be doing business with them regardless of whether somebody feels it is incumbent on me to police everybody else's behavior lest we become called out "should have known better".
I'm not new to this as I have used eBay, and many online vendors, for many years now but this specific situation is very new to me as it has never played out this way before regardless of some policy document somewhere that nobody knows about, can find, or reads, or even has reason to believe will ever apply to them.
It isn't that hard.
Just do the right thing and take care of your reputation and customer's experience.
I've been doing that for decades now so I'm always confused when others choose not to and even more confused when others choose to defend that sort of behavior.
In this case a seller sold an item that she knows was never received. If sapphire is correct then it is also very likely that she, in fact, received the money and received it within days because she has a large, active, eBay store. She requested time to sort thing out with the USPS, which we gave her, and she said if it couldn't be resolved she would refund the money. And, instead, the clock expired that we (and from what I can tell reading online many, many, others) did not know was even ticking and once expired this seller has chosen to no longer respond to us and keep a substantial chunk of money for services, and product, she did not render.
Don't really care whose "fault" it is.
At best this is an unfortunate "fell through the cracks" episode and, yes, I do believe that eBay should step in and help. At the very least eBay should not make it so damned hard to work with them on stuff like this especially given that it didn't used to be this ridiculously hard. That is on eBay. They are the ones that have chosen to do it this way.
At worst, it was a seller taking advantage of eBay's automation systems and leveraging her customer's desire to do the right thing, by helping her out, so she could leverage her vastly larger experience base to keep money that isn't hers to keep.
I have a hard time believing she is a bad person acting in bad faith. She gave no indication that she was anything but above board or that she would not do the right thing or the things she said she would do. I choose to believe this is the case and that something else must be going on but since she has completely stopped interacting with us we simply will probably never know one way or the other.
In the meantime we live and learn, will hopefully receive a refund from the credit card dispute case, and will leave information for future customer's of hers that this went down the the way it did.
Nothing else to do that I am aware of but there is plenty that eBay, and the seller, could do to keep this from happening the way it did. And, going forward, we now know that we can't trust and work with sellers even though, until now, we've never had any reason not to.
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