E-Bay

dlawson281.....please make sure you have tracking....cover yourself.
I have found that foreign buyers buy a low dollar item. They see if tracking is
applied.....they buy a large dollar item and then claim non-receipt.
Has happened to me more than once....
Now all foreign shipments go registered....regardless of value of item (buyer pays)

To try to answer your original question, could it be the buyer's inept way of saying that the item has been sold on another site and it is no longer available? This happened to me one time, but the seller was good enough to email me.


-IBFS

I just got a note from ebay that put another angle on this.

While they didn't go into details, ebay was shutting down a lot I bid on because it did not meet their ethical standards. I totally got it because the seller in question was offering fancy cancel fakes that were obvious to anyone familiar with the genuine article. Some were rather spectacular, and I wanted to buy cheap to blow the whistle on the seller and fakes of this type. Looks like someone beat me to it. Since he also has a number of items that are legit, they did not shut down all the lots he was offering, and they left a fair sample of fakes too. I am going to keep watching to see what comes next.

One never knows what one will stumble into on ebay.

I have received a 'sorry you can't bid with this seller' message from a seller in Texas who lists a lot of nice US material. I posted about it on another board and heard from others who got the same thing from a bid to him. we all sort of figured out that what we had in common was that we all participated in online discussion boards, including the ebay stamp forum. I think some sellers with too much time on their hands block possible bids from people whose comments they do not like or who they think might give them problems on a transaction.

Actually I faced this issue from an ebay seller based in the UK. His terms stated that he ships worldwide but after I won the bid I got an ebay message that the seller wants to withdraw and would not ship to the Middle east. I contacted the seller and he mentioned that he had lost many shipments to Kuwait and did not want to take the risk of shipping to the UAE. He said there was something to do with ebay policy where he would have to refund the entire amount plus shipping to me plus charges to ebay.

I am always asking US sellers to send me via "Registered Mail", because, if I have bought something, it is in my interest that I get that safely in my hands. I am rarely buying cheap items, but, in the case that something has a price a couple of $, it will be silly to pay $15 for the Registered Mail. But, in that, case, I will rather decide not to buy that item at all.

But, there is another problem... "Registered Mail" is available only in the US Post Offices, not in the ebay or USPS on-line shipping stores. So, the seller/sender must go in the Post Office to fill the form, pay in the cash or credit card... and the bigger sellers don't want to do that. They prefer to arrange the shipping on-line, and the Registered Mail is not available to be purchased on-line.

Additionlly, in some Post Office in the USA, Registered Mail for some specific countries is not available?? That is the main mystery to me. For example, I have received more than 200 Registered Mail packages from the USA in the last couple of years, but, here and there, some sellers use to told me that in their Post Offices told them that "Registered Mail" is not available for the overseas. WHY? I received a hundreds of them already...

There are 2 possible solutions: some clerks are totally dumb and uneducated about their jobs... or, smaller Post Offices in the USA really don't ship Registered Mail ovearseas... I am still not sure about that. But sure that sellers cannot make their shipping jobs on-line, and that is "pain in the neck" for the sellers who are selling a dozen or more items per day.