I quickly learned that there is a lot of suspicious activity amongst buyers and that the only "safe" way to deal with it is to never offer a partial refund. My policy is "take it or leave it". You claim it's not working? Great, start a return, ship it back with my label, and I'll refund when I get the money back. The big "LOL" with all of this is that it's amazing how many times they don't respond or that it's suddenly working or "why wouldn't I just want to give them a partial/full refund?" and it almost always ends up with no further activity (i.e. I'm pretty sure they were just trying to scam me). Just had this happen with a DC motor. Guy claims it's not working, at all. I say "sorry, please start a retrun process" and the next morning I see that he says he "removed and reinstalled the brushes and it now works perfect", something you should never do to a defective object (unless you bought it at a garage sale) and something that would likely never be the "fix".
So, how come we as sellers can't report this as "suspicious activity" that eBay can monitor behind the scenes and, after maybe a year and several of these reported they can go "Hmmmm, maybe this guys a scam artist?"? If it happens once, no big deal, maybe it really was defective. It's not like every incident needs to be evaluated, only those buyers with excess suspicious activity (number of incidents in a given time period).
I'm assuming nothing like this exists? I even though of starting a separate website that sellers could use to report activity and you could use to check before allowing a transaction to complete (at least for certain items that are more subject to this type of activity).
Okay, some of this is just venting and letting other people know how I deal with it. But if there is somewhere to notifiy of this activity, please let me know.
Thanks,
BB1
