eBay’ing with care
Feb 7th, 2007 by Oana
If you remember back to about a month ago, I had a small smoke problem with my Averatec 3200 laptop … the power jack would overheat to the point of melting the plastic and smoke started coming out. It freaked me out! I’ve had the laptop for 2.5 years now, I hadn’t backed up the data on it in a couple of months, and we’re living in the UK where it would have been quite expensive to do any major laptop repairs or to replace it.
The initial wisdom was that there was a problem with the cord and the AC adapter itself, so off I went to eBay to buy a new one. I wanted one quickly, so I looked for a UK seller and found this one from Manchester. I checked his feedback and seller history before bidding on the AC adapter, and all looked good (lots of positive comments, no negative ones in the last 6 months), so I used “buy now” and paid by Paypal.
4 days went by and I had heard nothing from the seller, despite my payment having gone through Paypal and showing up on my online Visa statement, so I emailed him. No response. Emailed again 3 days later. Finally got a response 10 days after my original purchase!
hi,i sent it to you 8 days ago by air mail from hongkong.it will take 12-15 working days normally, you know it is international post, sometimes it maybe delayed for some unknown reasons,i hope you can wait for a few days,if you still didnot get it, please let me know ASAP,i will try my best to help you, please donot worry about that.i am so sorry about the delay. thank you so much, have a nice day! sorry again.
Umm … so I guess he’s not in Manchester! The package arrived 4 days after that, and imagine my surprise when I read the shipping address on the label – it was shipped from Nanjing University, not Hong Kong … and certainly not Manchester.
Imagine my further surprise when I opened the package and found that the power cord was clearly used, not in the new condition it had been listed in. Not only that, the power cord did not fit into the power bar! Fortunately my old power cord could be plugged in, so I could test it. It did not solve the smoke problem, which is not the seller’s fault … but lying about his location and sending me an item that was used and did not actually fit together – that was clearly his fault!
I opened a Paypal dispute and left a negative comment on his eBay profile detailing the experience and got an email from the seller within 5 minutes! He wanted me to retract the comment and offered to ship me another AC adapter, or a refund. I took the refund option and retracted my comment, leaving his record blemish-free again.
Getting a refund was nice, but now that I know how the comment retraction process works, I will put much less stock in a seller’s comment ratings. I will also email sellers from now on before bidding to confirm where the item is being shipped from, disregarding what it says in the sellers’ profile about their location.
Technorati Tags: eBay, refund, comment retraction