CONSERVITVS • Volunteer Community Mentor
@allen1853 wrote:You are SOOOO right. Ebay lets buyers do whatever they please. They can claim anything to force a return. They do not have to provide photos or any proof whatsoever. Sellers trying to reason with eBay is fruitless. I have had buyers claim damage to an item. Upon return, no damage whatsoever. Ebay's response? Well you can relist it. Just eat the postage both ways, we do not care. They act like every indivodual seller is Jeff Bezos. We are not. We cannot eat the costs of fraud and make it up in volume.
I did some research on this many years ago - eBay was just starting buyer protections and I was actually looking for something at the Federal level (over eBay's head) that would extend protection, of a sort, to me. No such luck.
But I did find that there are laws and FTC (Federal Trade Commission) rulings that require sellers to make a buyer "whole" if the item they received is not in the condition stated when they purchased it. There are no laws or rulings that say buyers are not allowed to lie when making these claims. There are laws regarding Postal Fraud that may apply if you mail your customer's order, and there is always small claims court to attempt to get a judgement against them.
But here's the thing, and I've heard it from almost every retail company I did IT work for over the years -- going thru USPS or court takes time, effort, and in the case of court - money. If you spend 5 hours working with USPS to resolve the fraud claim, or spend 15hrs with your lawyer, and $1500 in their fees.... how much of that are you going to recover if you are found to be in the right? And how much more could you have listed and sold in that same amount of time?
-Bob.
@ilsa46 wrote:I guess Buyers can Lie, Commit Fraud, Cause significant Financial LOSS to Sellers and eBay just lets it happen. I didn't know that eBay really doesn't protect Sellers.
Correct on both assertions, unfortunately.
@baydistributionllc wrote:
@allen1853 wrote:You are SOOOO right. Ebay lets buyers do whatever they please. They can claim anything to force a return. They do not have to provide photos or any proof whatsoever. Sellers trying to reason with eBay is fruitless. I have had buyers claim damage to an item. Upon return, no damage whatsoever. Ebay's response? Well you can relist it. Just eat the postage both ways, we do not care. They act like every indivodual seller is Jeff Bezos. We are not. We cannot eat the costs of fraud and make it up in volume.
I bought a Chinese garbage lighting transformer to fix an expensive light fixture I have. Doesn’t work at all. It’s supposed to produce 12VAC and it produces 0.1VAC. I had a picture on deck next to a meter. Ebay REQUIRED the picture. It said “photo required to return this item.” I have never seen that before but I don’t return many items. I think its new. I like it.
Does eBay verify that the photo is of the actual product shipped? How would they do that? Requiring a picture and requiring a picture that confirms receipt of actual shipped item in defective condition are two different things. Buyers could attach a blurry, partial, small picture and it would be enough to pass the requirement.... but do nothing for the seller to determine if it's actually their product and/or if the customer is using it correctly.
It's a start, yes. But there is still plenty of room to get scammed, buyer or seller.
-Bob.
Make sure you REPORT THE BUYER. Sellers need to remember to do this, it only takes literally a few seconds. It is the ONLY way you can make sure Ebay is informed and they can collect this data on a buyer. While some may disagree, it still needs to be done by EVERY seller so that Ebay can collect the information.
They can't know all this stuff unless we tell them. So getting mad at them because they don't react to it is unfair, because they can't react to a situation they don't know about.
https://www.ebay.com/help/selling/resolving-buyer-issues/reporting-issue-buyer?id=4084
@lakefor94 wrote:
@ilsa46 wrote:I just had a Buyer File a False Claim 19 Days AFTER Delivery, and then Return the MINT Condition RARE Collectible in a Damaged Condition, Missing Pieces from the Box and Without the Box. And eBay says the Buyer is entitled to a FULL REFUND. I guess Buyers can Lie, Commit Fraud, Cause significant Financial LOSS to Sellers and eBay just lets it happen. I didn't know that eBay really doesn't protect Sellers.
eBay Does offer some protection. If you are a Top Rated Seller who offers 30-day or longer returns and the buyer returns something different, opened, used, etc. the seller can deduct up to 50% of the refund to recover the decreased value of the item.
Fraudulent transactions happen on every online selling venue. It is a very low percentage of transactions. In my view, 1% or 2% tops.
This applies only if: Seller is Top Rated, Seller has 30-day Free Returns and Seller Pays Shipping, and (this is the big one) if the buyer does NOT open a not-as-described Return. If the buyer claims not-as-described, you are not allowed to withhold anything. If you don't pay the return shipping, you can deduct nothing. And buyers know this too.... not the good buyers, they seldom have or create issues, but the scammers are the ones who keep up on policy and how to get around it.
The only plus to this scenario is that the buyer now has a return showing on their account. Perhaps they have a lot of returns showing on their account. You would hope that if their rate of return, especially for not-as-described, exceeds a fixed threshold, that eBay would restrict, suspend temporarily, or permantly unregister/NARU them. Since eBay's made no statements about monitoring any buyer activity (beyond how much the buyer has generated in income for eBay), we have no way to see if there is any tracking going on or if that tracking detail is available to assist sellers is avoiding high-return customers.
-Bob.
