Could someone please give me some advice on how I should set up my return policies.
I had a buyer who won the auction on a roll of wheat cents mixed with IHC, etc... They really wanted the roll badly because they kept bidding higher and higher and I had a feeling this may happen. It's surprising that so many buyers think that a $50 item will magically become a $300 item if they throw enough money at it.
Anyway, the buyer way over bid on the roll but once they received it they were very happy with it and gave me a nice + fb. Well 17 days later I get a message from eBay telling me the buyer wants a return on the roll now and the reason they used was "changed my mind". And the buyer wrote in the message that they did not open the roll. Ok then how could they tell me they were so happy with the coins? Fishy... So when the roll comes back and I discover the buyer has cherry picked the roll and replaced the good coins with crap I'm screwed.
So my question is, can i set up my return policy to protect myself from fraudulent returns like this? It does no good to report it to ebay and from the way the return policy is geared towards protecting the buyer and not the seller, will a strict return policy even matter? As it is right now ebay approves the return before even notifying me that a buyer wants a return, then if the seller finds an issue with their returned item and does not click "refund" but instead reports the issue to eBay they seller winds up with a violation on their service metrics for not refunding in time and eBay steps in and does it anyway, without even contacting the seller to discuss the reason for the report. Is there any way at all not to get screwed by buyers that abuse the return policy, or know the tricks? Short of not selling on here anymore or changing sales commodities what can a seller do to protect themselves? (and i don't want to hear anything about lubricants, it doesn't make it any better).
Any magic fixes by fellow numismatists?
