An Honest Mistake?

I recently bid on and won the stamp shown below at a relatively low price. It was described as being "Condition as seen on picture, fancy cancel, clean reverse side, sound stamp."





This is the stamp that I received from the seller and yes, those are pin holes you see on the reverse.




The seller has no negative feedback with over 300 seller ratings in the last 12 months so I initially assumed that it was a mistake on her part.

When I notified her that the item received was not as described and asked that she either send me the listed stamp or refund my money, she opted for the latter and offered no explanation or apology.

Accordingly, I'm inclined to believe that my winning bid was lower than what she thought the listed stamp was worth so she replaced it with the damaged stamp.

Typically I won't leave negative feedback when I believe a seller has made an honest mistake but I'm undecided as to how I will address this transaction.

I won't leave her feedback until I've received the refund so I've got some time to sort it out.

Anyone care to share their views on how I should proceed?

300 feedbacks (presumably stamp-related?) is enough to know better, but not too many to be able to blame the underpaid, overworked staff person who picked the wrong stamp.

That second stamp is barely a spacefiller and could not possibly be confused with the listed stamp.

"After further thought, I need a satisfactory explanation before I decide to accept a resolution other than delivery of the pictured stamp. Please respond."

My 2d.

There is quite a bit of resident wisdom on this forum!

I did send the seller the below email and her response follows.

Just reading this make me angry. That was very deceitful. It would have been better to come clean up front. But Instead, this seller tried to dupe you with an item not worth the paper its printed on.
IMO, this seller needs a serious ding in their feedback. They will do it again. But after you receive your refund.

I've had a few bad transactions like this, probably deceitful, but resolved satisfactorily. I always leave good feedback if seller resolves the issue on my terms Thats just me though. I can sympathize with leaving bad feedback also.

She is layering fraud on top of incompetence.

Not that it is necessarily worth your time to play detective, but if she relisted in error, or double listed, the other listing should be available to verify the story. Wouldn't excuse a thing regarding her subsequent actions, of course.

If there is any entertainment value in the free stamp when it arrives, please show it. I'm sure you're just dying to see how nice it will be.

I'm not holding my breath but I'll post a scan of the stamp, if one arrives.

I've already received my refund but I'm holding off on providing feedback until I see whether or not she honors her promise of another stamp. If I'm lucky, it may be of sufficient quality to defray the cost of postage for returning the pin cushion to her.

As to feedback, I typically do like HungaryForStamps does if resolution is satisfactory -- I note that the stamp was not as described and that the seller issued a refund.

If you don't want to leave negative feedback, then at least leave neutral. Even if the situation is "resolved", it can hardly be called a positive transaction.

The appropriate action for the seller would have been to email you to let you know that they had accidentally sold the stamp. The fact that the seller recognized that they had made a mistake, then tried to cover it up by sending you a different stamp was just plain fraudulent.

I can understand why the seller would now send you a free stamp-- they definitely don't want you to broadcast to the world what happened. It's a nice gesture, but the seller still made a horrible, horrible judgement error.

I've had a bunch of sellers tell me to keep a flawed stamp, and immediately refund my purchase. I would always give them good feedback, because they were willing to work with me with my funds. But this seller used deception....and that's just plain wrong.

I for one would love to know who it was....... :)

Ray

How sad is THAT!

Let it go,what more do you want? You are going to get another copy, and get a refund. What was the final $$$ you put out? $200 ? $300? Just don't buy from the seller again.No need for further action.

??? I didn't know ebay's software would let you relist if an item had sold.

If you use the sell like item function, it duplicates the listing and makes it post-able. If nothing is changed then the old listing is reposted.

Tom, I hope you get a decent stamp as well as the refund that you already received. I figure that if the seller is able to satisfy me in the end, I will leave a positive feedback but state that there was an issue that the seller resolved to my satisfaction.

Also if you relist to quickly sometimes a sold item will be in the unsold list for a couple of minute. I think it is because of very late bidding.

We have also ended up with an item in sold list and also the unsold list at the same time.

ebay is so much not a perfect science!