eBay

coppedco · ‎10-26-2023

Long story short, I sold my personal macbook air this week and today the buyer received it and almost immediately opened a return request which eBay approved automatically. The reason for his return is "I need 1tb instead of 500gb, ordered by mistake". I been dealing with eBay for more than a decade now and I know about all the different scams and I just know he will try to screw me over. My mistake was shipping it without checking the address first as I usually only ship to residential address just to be safe, specially with expensive items. This buyer used a random big commercial building in MO. I contacted eBay upon the request being opened and asked why was it automatically approved when I thought I could refuse the return if is just because of a change of mind and not something wrong with the item or not as advertised. I know about recording the opening of the package and inspecting the item on camera but I would like to know what else I can do to protect myself. Im also aware of the fake scan returns where the label gets scanned as delivered even if it never was so a video in that situation would not be possible. Thank you in advance for any guidance!!

coppedco · ‎10-31-2023

Update: Buyer sold the computer to a friend and closed the return. Recently I was almost scammed in a return that started a similar way so I guess Im a little paranoid 🫣😆 Thank you everyone for your responses!

bonjourami · ‎10-31-2023

Thats great!

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“Never pick a fight with an ugly person. They don’t have anything to lose.” ~Robin Williams

ckimodog · ‎10-31-2023

@coppedco

Good to read all went well for you. As others have said, selling high dollar electronics on eBay has lots of risks to consider. As @luxgoods suggested, sell it locally from now on & avoid the hassle and the headaches.

Happy Halloween!

hachumi · ‎10-31-2023

This is how I've been protecting myself.
Don't sell anything you can't afford to lose, I only sell things under 100.00 now.
No international shipping
No shipping anything large that might cost a lot to have shipped back.
I used to sell nice complete items (rc cars, rc airplanes) now I take them apart and sell them as parts, all easy to ship usps.
I still have inventory that's been paid for, this is what I'm selling, there is no profit in buying any new inventory for me.
This still gets me ripped off from time to time. been scammed several times, even used up the one freebe.
If you see my feedback you will see I received a strike for reporting a person for sending back the bad part and keeping the good one I sold. The outcome was the same, they got their money back and a free part, and if I just sucked it up everything would have been fine, but I reported it anyway, because at this point I don't care.
I have a pile of inventory that I'm trying to get motivated to list.
I haven't taken a payout in probably two years, I have just been using the funds to buy stuff I wanted or needed. Now it is hard to find the things I want here, and eBay is the most expensive place to buy stuff.

I've been selling on here since about 2000 under a few different Ids and selling different things.
I remember around 2005-2008 when they changed the feedback and started requiring paypal for everything, (you used to be able to take checks). there was a big uproar, people were going to quit, the Rah Rahs were in full swing.
This time it's way worse, way, way worse.

sextons-sweet-deals · ‎10-31-2023

Selling expensive electronics is not a good idea unless pick-up only. Let the real buyer check it out and pay then on site.

Ordered by mistake is an abusive excuse! Likely means you're going to get their broken MacBook back, maybe nothing at all and tracking will show returned because the return label was tampered with, or a box of junk.

You did make the mistake of not reviewing this buyer's complete feedback profile. How does it really look today? If you had reviewed feedback and looked up location, would you have still shipped?

You can entertain reporting the buyer and if they leave you bad feedback, you can reply to that feedback for everyone to see. I don't think some sellers take advantage of this feature.