Part question, part rant.
I've been selling car parts recently, mostly Honda and Toyota OEM interior trim pieces. This is relevant because buyers are refurbishing or replacing a part on an existing vehicle and there are only a couple of interior colors available for each model. So they know they need either gray or brown or black, for example. I put the item color in the title, details, and item description. All of these parts are used, and many of them are 20+ years old so I try to ensure my listings clearly state the condition and there are several photos if there's any indication of wear or features that may be important to a buyer. A lot of the parts are hard to find, so buyers are happy with a faded "X" as long as it's not broken.
Toyota interior pieces for this particular model/year are either brown/tan, gray, or black. The item disputed is listed as Brown / Tan in 3 places in the listing. The item itself is in great condition with very little fading or wear, so it's close to the original color as you'll find. I will agree that a lot of photos of similar items listed, it's hard to distinguish between gray and brown. That being said, if I was buying the part, I'd rely on description over photo. And if the photo appeared different from the description and I wanted to make sure, I'd send the seller a question to clarify. But that's just me.
Buyer requested a return and said "it looks gray in the photo but the actual item received is brown". So he obviously wanted gray, and wanted to believe it's gray despite my listing clearly stating it's Brown / Tan. My photos to me look clearly brown, but I can't help someone's vision or quality of the screen they're viewing.
As of right now I'm refusing the return because my listing is correct. Is there any chance this would go in my favor? The only return I would be OK with is one that the buyer paid the return shipping, but odds are they will not be OK with that and we're back to square one.
I guess the takeaway here for me is that I need to take the photos a step further and label the actual photos with the color name to ensure the buyer knows what they are looking at despite any color variations they see. And also put some sort of additional statement on color in the listing description to indicate the same.
*sigh*
