Return policy

[m3020]

I am flabbergasted that Ebay would think to restrict peoples return policy for some outrageous amount of time of 30 days. What the HELL!

Ebay was built by small seller like myself and big companies wanted nothing to do with them. Now you ignore the sellers who made ebay to focus on big seller. What small seller do you think would be able to afford a 30 day return policy. why would you restrict someone who wants to offer some return policy but cannot afford to allow people to have their items for 30 days before returning it? REALLY  who is this policy for .  I am so disgusted with ebay at this point and their outrageous changes that time and time again infringe on the little people and sellers on their site.  You are paid to have my listings and when I sell, how dare you tell me I have to have a 30 day return policy if I want to have one.STAY out of my business

[thehonorabletrader]

eBay has been shifting to this for a while. Let me clear up some things for you....

You always agree to accept returns on eBay.

This is true. By selling on eBay you are agreeing to accept any return under the eBay Money Back Guarantee.

What does "no returns" mean?

You as a seller can only set the "remorse" return policy. So this is for "i changed my mind" or "I found a better price" returns, not for any other returns.

Why 30 days?

This is a seller protection. You may not see it, and it doesn't feel like a seller protection to "small time" sellers, but it is. You may or may not be aware, but for anyone to be able to accept a Visa card (Walmart, Amazon, you, other small sellers) they must agree to the Visa terms and conditions. This means you as a seller (and Walmart as a seller, and your neighborhood coffee shop as a seller, and your local taco stand) in order to accept Visa agree to be bound to and agree to Visa's Buyer Purchase Protection (aka, Chargebacks). You agree to refund (without return) if Visa finds in favor of the buyer. This is also true of AmEx, MaserCard, Discover, and PayPal. While PayPal has seller protections none of the others do have protections for merchants/sellers, only for the buyers.

So, this means that if the buyer files a buyer protection dispute with their credit card, you have already agreed to refund the buyer and not get the item back. eBay and PayPal will try to get the item back, but they can not guarantee it as it is in control of the credit card company.

This is exactly the reason so many retailers offer returns, because ultimately they don't have any final say if they want to accept credit cards.

eBay's return policy is to encourage buyers to ask for returns under the eBay Money Back Guarantee so that eBay can enforce the item be returned before the refund be given without eBay's control.

It's not fair. But it is the nature of credit card companies. The Kroger Company recently dropped Visa from all of it's processing nationwide because of Visa's strong arm practices with sellers. I would hope more and more merchants would start fighting back against this accidental Monopoly so that the credit card companies would start providing more balanced service because as it stands right now, Credit Card companies only protect their customers and not the merchants.