Jul
31
Don’t Let a Seller String You Along
Filed Under eBay Fraud
An article added recently posted to the eBay corporate blog discusses the increasing prevalence of sellers stringing along buyers they intend to defraud by not sending the goods after payment has been made.
For example, the sellers may say things like, “Oh, I sent the item, I can’t imagine what’s wrong…” or “I’ll check what happened with my shipper, just wait a few days” or “it just bounced back through the mail, let me send a replacement.” All of these things are fine to say if they’re true, and they’re just what you want to hear if you’re a buyer with a problem. But the experienced member asserted that these sellers are stringing their buyers along for a more insidious reason: they want the buyer to lose their eligibility to file a dispute or claim.
Buyers can only file a dispute on PayPal up to 45 days after the payment is made, and up to 60 days on eBay after an auction closes or the buyer makes a buy-it-now purchase. As sellers are usually much more savvy about eBay and PayPal’s rules and resolution processes, buyers often don’t know what their eligibility window is prior to experiencing a transaction problem. That leads to a situation where an unscrupulous seller can mislead and distract their buyer for long enough that the buyer loses eligibility, and then the seller can act with impunity knowing the buyer is no longer able to file a protection claim.
In the post, eBay recommends that buyers who are approaching the end of the filing window should file a dispute in order to preserve their rights and the protections afforded to them by eBay and PayPal — no matter how friendly and responsive the seller may seem.
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