Ebay Process - Not The Best Process..?

I think it is easier to rip off a seller on ebay than it is for the seller to rip off the buyer. If the buyer claims he never received it and you have no means to track the item, ebay will most likely rule in favor of the buyer and refund the money.

Most certainly true for lower priced items which don't get tracking.

ebay has a lot of motivation to want to see higher dollar transactions; they certainly make more profit on them. Plus ebay wants to increase the average sale price per transaction; keep in mind from their perspective it costs the same to process and support a $1.00 transaction as it does a $100 transaction.

Without question ebay policies are written with buyers being their primary customers. A lot of sellers really choke on this, they feel like they are the ones really paying the bills. This is a lot like Google; who feels like their real customer is the user who is searching, not those folks who are buying ads or high rankings.

Amazingly even with this bias there are still a large number of sellers who have figure out how to exploit ebay's system and are impacting our great hobby.
Don

The seller is paying the bill by making the purchase which includes the additional markup for ebay & PayPal fees/commissions. The seller is only an agent. Sure the sell lists the items but like most everything else in this world the consumer pays. As far as receiving or not receiving items sold on ebay, after thousands of purchases since 1995 once and a while I do not receive an item -maybe one in a thousand, but it does happen. I understand The USPS processes over 200 billion pieces of mail per year. 5.5 billion (3%) aren't deliverable as addressed -- 1.3 billion are returned to sender, 2 billion are discarded, the rest are forwarded. While those numbers don't specifically deal with "lost" mail, it looks like about 1% is thrown out. I get mail addressed to neighbors every once in a while, I put it back on my mail box so the mailman will redeliver, maybe others don't. Maybe there are those who intentionally take advantage of no tracking but I am sure it is nowhere near 1%.

I live in a town where only the PO sells stamps, there are no stamp dealers. Without ebay, adding additional stamps to my collection would be slow and possibly very expensive. I have had 1997 transactions as a seller and 1550 as a buyer. I have never had a sold item lost in the mail and have only had 1 item I bought never reach me. You have to be an alert buyer and do your homework before you bid and you need to be really honest as a seller. Be selective with the sellers you buy from and you should have a successful transaction. I don't think I am lucky I am just aware of what happens on ebay. I am sure that there are some horror stories on ebay but so far it is the only online business I have dealt with for buying and selling stamps and I would rate it 10 out of 10. In my opinion most of the buyers and sellers on ebay are honest.

Only real problem I have with ebay is that I spend too much time browsing stamps and spend too much money buying them.

I have actually been buying a lot on BidStart lately - it's a great place to pick up cheap singles and sets that you don't see on ebay (except maybe as part of a mixed lot). Most better stamps are similarly priced on ebay vs. BidStart, so I tend to buy those on ebay from more established sellers. But I've got thousands of blank spaces to fill in my international collection with CV of a few bucks or less and I'm finding I can fill most of them for pennies apiece (even as singles) on BidStart.

There are far more protections in place for buyers than sellers on ebay. It is FAR easier for a buyer to rip off a seller, and no I will not go into details on all the different ways this can be done.

Buyers do not need MORE protections within the ebay commerce system. If you pay for something with PayPal and fund it with a credit card, you have two layers of protection against nondelivery or SNAD, and 45 days to get any issues resolved.

Also, many novice (and also not so novice) buyers "jump the gun" and if they don't have their merchandise within a week, start screaming and filing disputes. This is a fairly big issue in categories, e.g., stamps, where most items are sent via 1st class mail and without tracking. Depending on the location of both the buyer and seller, 1st class items can take 2-3 weeks to arrive. Buyers need to be more patient... you're covered for 45 days, so filing a dispute before even contacting the seller after only 7-10 days is doing the seller a disservice, especially when you realize that communicating in that now way counts a strike against the seller even if the dispute is eventually withdrawn.

As a buyer, if I have not received my items after 3 weeks, assuming there was no tracking number supplied, I will contact the seller and ask to confirm the shipping date and method. Only after 5 weeks will I initiate a dispute for nonreceipt.

Also, people need to realize that USPS, UPS, or FedEx misrouting a shipment, or weather delays, are not the fault of the seller, even though ebay would have you believe otherwise...

Ok...Now if the item I bought below is not delivered on time and I dont know why it takes a whole month to deliver...Do I contact the seller or ebay..??

Wert,
I would give it a few more days. It was free shipping on a less expensive item; plus it clearly says to expect delivery between 7/10 and 7/23.
Don

As a general rule, I would never contact ebay about any concern related to a transaction unless I had first discussed the matter with the seller.

Taking that concept a step further, the same applies to leaving less than 5 star feedback - I would never consider leaving unfavorable feedback without first discussing my "concerns" with my trading partner.

wert: You left the item number on the photo so it was easy to figure out the seller. The seller is also in Canada and they do mention in the ad that it takes 10 business days just to process the order and another 7-10 business days for delivery. It's probably traveling at some sort of surface rate since it's free shipping. They are a huge seller with million plus feedback. They do have some negative strikes, mostly for non-delivery, but they do respond to every negative feedback and it looks like they want to work with the sellers.

I would contact them directly and let them know you haven't received your item. They have more of the same item and perhaps they can send you a replacement.

As for myself, I just had a German buyer open a claim that they haven't received a couple of FDCs I mailed July 1st. Normally mail to Germany is pretty quick and efficient so this missing item is a first for me for mail to Germany. I sent a message to please allow one more week to see if the postal system is just slow which I hope that is the case.
If not, in a week I send a refund. Not much else I can do. Unfortunately, the buyer opened the claim on the German ebay site, ebay.de. I can see the claim listed on My ebay, but when you follow the link everything is in German so it makes it very difficult to respond. I did respond hopefully correctly, but who knows since I couldn't read all the selections and pull down tabs. I just hope the buyer understands and works with me.