by Sadie Davis

Created on: April 18, 2009   Last Updated: April 20, 2009

I've been a seller and a buyer on eBay for several years. I've had many good experiences and a few bad ones. In this article, I'll detail one of each.

As a seller, I had a lot of positive feedback with a 100% positive rating. Things were looking very good for me. I sell only one type of item. I had noticed a particular buyer and seller team who would bid under 1 user ID then resell under the other user ID. Well, they hit me. The buyer bought one of my items for very little money. He paid immediately. Then he sent me an e-mail stating that he didn't want to pay so much for shipping. When you buy on eBay, you're signing an electronic binding contract. This guy agreed to the terms of sale which clearly stated the shipping cost. We argued back and forth for quite a while. I did not change my terms for him. I mailed his item and several days later I got my very first negative feedback from him. He stated in the feedback that I sent him something other than what was in the picture. Not true at all. He received exactly what was pictured. Then he went on to say it was junk and unusable. I then decided to check his other feedback left for sellers. He has a long history of buying these items cheap, leaving the seller bad feedback, then reselling this "junk" under his girlfriend's user ID for top dollar. When they resell it, they claim they found the items. The two of them have a great racket going. They destroy other sellers, then resell for a lot more money. They've been reported to eBay many, many times but it continues, adding insult to injury for all sellers they destroy.

As a buyer, I had one truly bad experience. I bought a beautiful sapling tree. It was a Royal Paulownia. I paid quite a bit of money for it. When the tree arrived in excellent condition, but it was not a Royal Paulownia. It was a maple. Since I live in the northeast, a maple is the last thing I want. Every spring I go out and pull all the seedling maples out of the cracks of my sidewalk and mow them over in the yard. Maples are a dime a dozen here. I wanted what I paid for - a beautiful, pink, fragrant, flowering tree. I immediately e-mailed the seller who told me to wait and make sure it was a maple. I wrote again and told him I know what a maple is and it's a maple. I wanted to send it back, at my expense, and get it replaced with the tree I paid for. Well, within days, this seller posted that he was on vacation, not checking eBay or e-mail, for the next 3 months. I contacted eBay and PayPal and was not able to get this resolved through them either since the seller was missing. In the end, I didn't get my money back, never heard from the seller again and had to buy a whole new tree.

As both seller and buyer, we are all left open for bad trading partners. It's a shame that there are people out there like this, but I suppose it's just a sign of the times. Some people feel entitled to destroy others to boost their own sales and others feel entitled to take buyers money and not produce the goods they pay for.

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