I should have recorded both my screen and my phone conversations because it would've made for excellent, albeit dark, comedy.
OK, first things first:
1. I bought a cell phone. It came with a burned in screen, which I understand the seller did not notice so I had to exchange it. Notice, I said "EXCHANGE" not return. The seller seems to be trustworthy and agreed to send me a new phone as soon as I receive this one.
2. I return the phone, via E-bay system, and choose "EXCHANGE". Not "REFUND".
3. Here is where problems start: the seller gets a message that I want a refund, so they refund the money.
4. I paid for 1 yr warranty as well... and that's one of the reasons I bought that phone - I wanted to protect my purchase for at least a year.
5. Now, with this purchase being refunded, I am not sure I can get that warranty again. So I decide to ask E-bay why they told the seller to refund the money when I asked for exchange. And here is where Twilight zone starts.
6. I click on "Tell Us What you think" link on the "messages" page, the same page where I exchanged messages with the seller. I get "404 page not found". I click a few times and get the same thing every time.
7. So now I navigate to E-bay help. I can call, or they can call me. I choose "call me". The wait would have been only 2 min. But, the phone number which is on my account, and it's a US number, get's a UK prefix +44. So, the system says "wrong number". I never entered that as a prefix to my number. I never told that to anyone either. E-bay somehow decided that California and my home must be in UK and proceeded to add that prefix to my US number.
8. I navigate to "my ebay" and preferences and personal info, but there is no place where one can change country code or phone prefix to get a call. This is the third e-bay fail in just as many minutes.
9. So I call them. An indian fellow answers the phone. That's OK, I am thinking, nothing wrong with saving a bit of money on stupid phone calls. But my call is not that stupid - it is about three problems I am having with E-bay: my phone number, the broken link for "tell us what you think" and most imporantly - for not respecting the customer's wish for an exchange and refunding the money instead. Unfortunately, the Indian fellow has not only a thick accent that I cannot understand what he says, but he cannot understand me either. What should have been a simple conversation turned into 10 minutes of "Huh? can you repeat that?" and "can you tell me your address?" "Your number?" " can you spell that?" and so on, ad nauseum. Then he asks me for my credit card number. That sounded awfully strange. He just verified my identity 10 times over, and he needs my credit card?
10. Finally, I see too much time is wasted and I am not even close to telling what my problems are, so I ask the fellow to let me talk to someone who is faster, and speaks english.
11. I get another indian fellow, with marginally better English skills. He tells me I won $100 reward, and he needs my credit card to put that money in my account. It sounds strange, but I give him the credit card number. He then asks me for security code. I tell him I don't give that away when I am not paying. And I am not paying. He tells me he needs that to verify my CC. I tell him - lets make this simple: forget about $100 reward, lets solve my e-bay issue. I don't have a reason to believe you are from e-bay anyway, and the longer this goes on, the more it sounds like a scam, than a legit company like E-bay. He asks me for CC number again.
12. Finally he agrees to let me talk to his supervisor. The call gets transfered to some automatic message that asks me for my credit card number. Funny thing is, E-bay does not have my CC number because I use paypal to pay for everything, and the cc number was recently change. The only way E-bay would have my CC number would be if they got it from Pay Pal.
And in the end, I had to hang up without getting even close to any type of resolution.
Signed: amazed in California (with country code from UK).
