@toyshnip wrote:
@parkersparrow wrote:
Amazon has a service called FBA: Fulfillment by Amazon. Where they store and fulfill someones own stock. This is allowed by ebay. What they don't allow is what is called arbitrage droppshipping where a seller will sell items they do not own and misuse their prime shipping accounts. The problem is unless you're ebay, you can't really know for sure if this is being done. Yes a gift receipt is a clue. But just shipping in an amazon box doesn't mean anything.
We had a case of arbitrage droppshipping - but the opposite direction. We had an item that was sold a few times. Every time the seller placed a note saying it was a gift and not to include a packing slip. We noticed that many of the orders was from the same ebay buyer. We googled the buyer username and found his Amazon seller account.
So this Amazon seller would sell items on Amazon. When the order comes in, he goes to ebay, purchases the item from us, tells us that it is a "gift" and we ship to his customer.
eBay doesn't allow arbitrage dropshipping. If an e-bay does want to do dropshipping, it is possible if that seller shows he has an agreement with the dropshipper. Buying from Amazon or any online seller is not allowed. A deal with a distributor or a fulfillment center (Like Amazon FBA), is ok.
We had the same problem, at the time I didn't care however the item was handcrafted and as a machine part it didn't take long before certain back yard mechanics started to experience problems mostly related due to inexperience... However the real problem began when these certain back yard mechanics contacted the seller who didn't have a clue as to what they were selling and couldn't answer even simple questions related to the item other than to state "please return for refund" which (and it's still a bit funny at this stage) then resulted in the item ending up in that reseller's hands... Since obviously the buyer couldn't return it to me...
What happens if you don't own what you sell and you don't sell what you own...
And this is where the problem begins, if questions aren't properly answered this particular item results in a large return ratio... And this seller who obviously ended up owning quite a few in some kind of order then tried to get me to take the returns by using a mildly convoluted system that is basically a reverse of how they sell it in the first place... It's hard to imagine a dropshipper doing this but it can be done, to have a buyer return an item to the original seller and the refund goes through the dropshipper back to the buyer, this tactic was particularly infuriating to me since I had no control over what this idiot was doing and once I caught on (several returns into it) I blocked that ID and then the problem started all over with another ID...
Long story short I wrote them a cease and desist letter but it wasn't for some time before the abuse eventually stopped.
mam98031 • Volunteer Community Member • Buyer/Seller since 1999
