A few years ago I put up a status update on Facebook; and it read like this:
“The wife has discovered online shopping. I’m dead.”
That of course elicited a lot of ‘Likes’ and humorous comments that followed that status update!
I’ve been purchasing small items on eBay for a while now, and they run quite a wide gamut; Hannah’s plush toys, computer accessories (e.g. cable connectors), lens filters and assorted camera accessories. Most of the purchased items are usually extremely cheap – usually less than $20, but many costing just a few dollars even. Surprisingly, the vast majority of my shopping experiences have been quite positive, but two have been poor in the last 4 years, and both involving sellers based in China.
The long-story summarized in both cases are similar; they send you a defective product, and when you seek a refund, they plead/ask nicely for you to send it back to them (at your cost) where they’d refund or send you a new item. Each time I did exactly just that, and you never hear from them again. Normally, it’s possible to initiate a dispute incident through eBay or your payment merchant. Unfortunately, their incident rules require a within 45 day response window, after which both providers will do nothing, and both times those crooked sellers have gotten away because I was nice enough to have given them the benefit of doubt at the expense of my response window lapsing.
Oh well; lesson learned. The next time I buy something from China-based sellers, I won’t hesitate to start a dispute incident immediately at the first sign of potential difficulty. Better safe than sorry, and auto-resolve the dispute on my own if things work out rather than play nice and let these buggers fleece me.
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