Be Excellent To Each Other

Blimey, what would they have to do to make you think negative feedback was OK?

Yes, leave negative feedback for that!

I would have accepted £20 max for postage. Negative feed back left.

Sounds like someone should have put a reserve on their auction

So the postage originally £22.50? That still seems pricey but yeah. Negative feedback!

Was close to that

Bid £20 for and won a roof rack for Big Car. Paid pretty much as soon as auction ended using PayPal on Sunday evening but heard nothing g from the seller so far, despite my chirpy messages to arrange collection. Don't think I will see that money again, or the roof rack.

If you paid paypal, just raise a dispute. A refund is pretty much guaranteed.

Probably will do. It is annoying as the roof rack is £100+ new and the uncharitable part of me thinks that the seller wanted more than the £20 I paypal'd them as per the listing. I will wait until tomorrow and then right a slightly less cheerful missive as you never know, there could have been a family crisis or some such.

Ebay is entirely weighted to the buyer these days, you'll get your cash back no problem. You'd probably even get your cash back if you picked up the item in person and signed a photo he took of you holding it...

The seller could be on half term holiday. also a good chance they are not wanting to let it go so cheaply. So it depends what you want to do. As Trooper said there is no issue with you getting your £20 back, but maybe you should call Ebay and see what they say if you want the roof rack for the money you paid.

I picked it up last week so all good. Thank you for the help and advice.

I've just sold GTAV for the 360 on ebay but it's been bought by someone in Puerto Rico. The game is the PAL version so am I right in thinking that it won't work over there? Or is that not the case any more with HDMI and all that?

My mom bought a jacket off eBay and paid for it along with £5.50 postage. We then received a message off the seller saying that they were going to be in our area yesterday afternoon so if someone was in, they'd drop it off.

We said fine but asked if they could have refunded the postage since they're not posting it. The seller responded by saying that they wouldn't refund it as they were using their time and petrol to drop it off and instead... Have now posted it.

I'm not sure whether I'm in the wrong here? People are weird.

Really?

I've no idea what it would cost the person in time/petrol money to drop the item off but you can say for sure it's a non-zero value so asking for the whole of the postage to be refunded is, I think, pretty cheeky from your side. How you work out what it's worth I don't know mind you, but then personally I'd have been happy to accept that I'd paid some amount of money for the goods to be transported to me and as long as they arrive safely I wouldn't even have thought about quibbling. So, yeah, I think you're wrong here.

And presumably they've subsequently decided to post it after just thinking 'fuck those guys, I don't really want to deal with them face to face now'.

If he's already in his area though, it is a zero cost as the seller is not spending any extra money.

I'm pretty sure I wouldn't care. You paid a price which you agreed in order to get it delivered to your house. If the seller had offered free postage then he'd likely have got more.

Bear in mind it wouldn't have cost £5.50 to post anyway, most likely. Postage is just a way of bumping up the price. Ebay is a con.

However also remember that Ebay itself is the biggest con of the whole thing as from about the start of last year they started charging their final value fee on postage as well.

So that £5.50 you paid to post it - ebay took 55p of it , and also will have taken 3% off the top if you paid with paypal (so another few pence)

I always just pay the price I'm happy with including postage, I don't really care how the seller wishes to break it down, he could say that it cost him £10 in sellotape to wrap the thing but as long as he was up front about it I don't care.

Without asking for detailed travel plans you don't know how, when or why the seller is doing anything so I just wouldn't have bothered asking and left it as is.

Also, I think eBay mandates what the maximum amount you can charge for postage is for particular types of item - including in some cases forcing you to offer free delivery.

Unless they've gone back on that.

They have arbitrary limits on items / on specific categories which you cannot go above (e.g. I think for posting a 'game' the maximum is about £3.50 ?)

Some of these make sense and help to stop the 'item for a penny and £10 postage' which in the past also dodged the ebay final value fees , however sometimes what you are listing in that catagory cannot be posted for that amount - the obvious one that hit me for this was magazines

I was selling off some older magazines , and listed a pack of 10 - the maximum postage allowed in that category is around £3 and postage would be a lot more (I think i ended up putting local collection down and saying I would post but would post at whatever the actual cost was and we sorted it out afterwards).

Yep, you are.
The time and fuel to get it to your door aren't free, so I'm not sure why you would expect it to be delivered for zero cost.

No, but they said they were going to be in the area. So they were paying that time and fuel regardless.

I would have expected it to be free (or a little cheaper at least) because they messaged saying they were in the area anyway so you'd imagine that the cost of them being here would be covered by whatever reason they're here for.

I wouldn't charge someone for dropping something off if I was in the area but maybe it's because I'm a nice guy?

Don't worry, most people are just arseholes.

I've been on this forum long enough to know that you're exactly right.

I sold a T-shirt on ebay and when the buyer received it, he said it didn't fit right and asked for a refund. I agreed with this as I don't want the hassle.

He sent it back fine and dandy and I've refunded him the price of the item plus his original postage. He's now saying that I should refund the postage that he spent getting the T-shirt back to me.

It's not a massive amount, but it's now all about principles. What do you think? Should I refund him some more?

If it were defective I would say yes, but he's bought it and returned it unwanted, so I would say no at this point.

Doesn't eBay have guidelines about this situation? It must happen all the time and leaving it up to constant individual negotiations between buyers and sellers is just asking for trouble.

Good idea, I was just basing it on my experience of buying things online. If I send something back faulty, they usually cover all the costs, but if I don't want it then I have to pay the postage to return it. Seems fair.

I've had a quick look as I've only found out about it this morning but I can't see anything official yet.

The moneysavingexpert forum seems to think that I don't need to refund them.

It can be tricky and if it was faulty then you would probably have to pay his return postage however the 'wrong size' (as long as you gave the size accurately in your description) is not one you have to worry about.

FYI I had something similar with Amazon and a marketplace sale - I bought a t-shirt , it didnt fit and i returned it - i got my original postage (and the item) amount back but i had to cover the return

If you made it clear that the t-shirt was say medium on your sale then its down to the buyer to check what he is buying especially with clothes. If you specified the size then the item can't be classed as not as described

I think you have been very good, I would have sold this with no return attached to it. I would call Ebay they are usually quick to answer and helpful.

Think the guy is being unreasonable unless you got the size wrong in the sale or didn't show it. Even then what sort of dick would buy clothes without checking the size first?

This is absolutely the course of action I would expect.

This is what I was thinking. The guy seems adamant that I owe him the postage but I'll see how it goes. Incidentally, PayPal won't let you increase the amount of a refund past the total price+postage.

My advice is never to sell on eBay. It's a principle I've stuck to for about ten years now.

I don't think I've even used ebay since
2004.

Which has been aided by how crap it's become.

I will buy stuff if I can't get it elsewhere (or it's prohibitively expensive elsewhere), but I will never sell now - it's way too skewed towards the buyer.

It is swayed to the buyer but what's the alternative? I've got stuff to get rid of that is worth too much to take to a charity shop so where else can I sell them that has eBay's reach?

I've never had an eBay account because the very idea of buying from, or selling to, randoms on the internet seem like something only a crazy person would sign up for voluntarily.

I bought a tweed jacket. It was the wrong size. It cost £12 in total so I will throw it away. Or offer it as a cottage quiz prize. I suppose if you spend hours arguing over 4 quid is it worth it?

Gumtree? Amazon?

Amazon confuses me. Is Gumtree any good? I've seen adverts for it but it's clearly not as big or as popular as ebay.

I buy from eBay, but would not sell. MrsA does that through Facebook groups. I tend to only buy low end bike tat mind you

I'd rather do without the cash for the hassle it can cause and charity shop the whole lot. I must have given away so much stuff that has real value. I appreciate not everyone can afford to be that choosy, though.

I sold all my Xbox 360 stuff on Amazon Marketplace though. They take a higher cut, but because they already have everything in their catalogue it makes listing it super easy.

Just for the record, I gave him a refund for only the shirt plus one lot of postage. Ebay agreed this was fine and the case was closed.

I'm here again.

I've sold an ipod that's got to go to Italy but apparently, royal mail won't let you send lithium batteries through the post.

I'm going to have to go somewhere else and lie about what's inside. I mean, what's the chances of being found out? Slim I would have thought.

I had a comedy issue with this kind of thing once. I'd packaged up a phone and was in the post office with it. The women asked if I'd left the battery in and, assuming they'd prefer I left it disconnected, I lied and said I'd taken it out before packaging it all up. It turns out this was the wrong assumption so I had to take my parcel round the corner and stand there for ten minutes then come back in again pretending I'd repacked it with the battery connected. That'll teach me to not read regulations and then lie about it. By which I mean it'll teach me to lie more efficiently in future.