Sigh. I hate pikers who think something is negotiable after agreeing to the price. I had a guy show up in response to a CL ad for a towbar and braking device for towing a car. The price was more than reasonable for these items (I think it was $600). So he shows up with a grin on his face and then says “So. . . . . .you want $600 for these? Gee, I wanted to get over here quickly before somebody else got them, so I only have $400 on me (flashing the money like I’m going to immediately swoon at the sight of so much filthy lucre).” “Yes, $600; there’s an ATM about four blocks thataway. I’ll still be here when you get back.” So he then goes out to his pickup, where his wife is waiting, and gets the other $200 from her! I nearly told him to fuck off, but wanted this stuff out of my garage.
I could use a treadmill like that. I’ll give you $75 for it if you can ship it here.
Well, it’s not so much that it takes you time to get it done, but it takes a while for stuff to get here. If we want something quickly, we tend to not buy from the US and just go local. 
On that note, ask me about how our house sale went some day. No, on second thought, please don’t - I don’t get nearly as angry when I think about it these days, and some stuff is better left alone.
Oh man, I’m on another site (an entertainment app for the iPhone) and this sort of thing happens all the time. The article will specifically be about something like a starlet faking a tattoo or wearing a wig for a movie, yet half the comments will be from people wondering however she could do such a thing because she’d always been so pretty with long hair or sans ink. Occasionally, the information they need to understand what the hell they’re talking about is RIGHT IN THE FUCKING TITLE. Begs belief, it does.
Oh, and I’ve misread eBay ads a time or two. But even though I’ve won, I figured the onus was on me to except whatever outcome because I was the one who was the dumbass and didn’t read all the way through / well enough. Actions have consequences. Duh.
QFT
I almost fainted the first time I got prices to ship to Oz. Shipping was over $250 for an $80 set of pipes. I contacted the buyer with the info and offered to refund his money because I didn’t think anyone would be willing to pay that much. He paid right away and even asked if my $20 charge for packing and handling was enough to pay for proper packing.
(I get a lot of Harley swag at runs. Pens, beer can coozies, cheap T-shirts, etc. I tossed a couple of handfuls of random stuff in the box because I felt so sorry for the buyer. He loved that.)
I watched the tracking and it took forever (as in over a month) for the buyer to get his pipes. His glowing review said wonderful things about how quickly I shipped them, that I was easy to work with and that my s/h charges were very reasonable.
My ads always say that I will ship on the Saturday after I recieve payment.
I shipped some small parts to a buyer in a neighboring state. I was able to do it at lunch, so they got shipped BEFORE I had promised. The buyer ripped me a new one because it had taken so long to ship AND because I charged a handling fee.
Keep the money, and if he bitches send him(and eBay) a copy of the original agreement. How else is the idiot going to learn anything if he doesn’t have to pay for his mistakes?
If he complained to ebay he would definitely get a refund and it would count against you as a seller.
Local pickup is often an option along with shipping. I agree the person was a bonehead for missing it. You’d think they’d look for shipping fees specifically to calculate total cost but I know lots of people do not read the entire post and have to have things pointed out to them after the fact.
Anything that varies from the norm, you need to put not just in the listing but in large bolded font, maybe red, so people don’t skim past it in the description. Refund his money and you can send a 2nd chance offer to the person he outbid, and you can make sure he’s local.
What? If the guy knows anything about ebay he will log an official complaint and they will refund his money. Ebay heavily favors the buyer.
Give him a refund , send a 2nd chance offer to the person who bid just under him and move on.
That happened to us concerning a cello the buyer claimed was a copy and not what we listed. ebay refunded the buyers money and when we asked about our cello we were told it was destroyed as a copy. WTF!! sadly we do too much business to tell them to piss off.
FYI, you could just get a free phone number from Google Voice and use that for your ads. Then you just forward calls to the GV# to go to your regular phone# when you want to receive calls, and turn off the forwarding when you don’t want calls. Even with the forwarding turned off, you could still make use of the voicemail, and could even have voicemails forwarded to you via email. All that, 100% free.
I shipped a number of ebay items to Canada and just marked them as ‘gifts’, which apparently excuses them from import duties (?).
Don’t get yourself riled on my account :).
I had a similar rage from the buyer’s side when putting in a bid for my house. I offered $185k. It was accepted by the sellers, everything was put in motion to sign the contracts.
I get a call from their real estate agent “Oh, the sellers wanted to know if you would consider going up to $186k”
Me: “I still have a rental contract on a house that’s good for another 8 months. Your sellers REALLY want to screw this deal dicking me over one grand?”
Agent: “Um, never mind”
See, though it took over a month to get them, if he was watching the same tracking you were then he’d be able to see you did ship them on the day you promised. The length of time shipping takes (Especially by cargo container, which is what it sounds like if it took a month) is not in the seller’s control. I think being so distant, we have a better understanding of that fact than some people who live closer to you.
That’s really fucking nasty of ebay/paypal. When I read about the violin I was stunned. If the seller is prepared to offer a full refund, they should get the item back. If there’s really such a concern about it being a copy or a counterfeit then perhaps Paypal or Ebay should make the buyer get an appraisal, with the cost of the appraisal being paid by the seller if the item IS fake and by the buyer if it is real.
I was ready to walk away from our deal over $1000, too. I was getting very annoyed at the buyers trying to nickel and dime us over stuff that had already been settled.
Speaking of people not being able to read, I’ll toss people who don’t read posts or threads in, too. That still bugs me - read the fucking thread, people! All of it!
Requiring the destruction of merchandise IS nasty. Oh, people could still game your proposal (by buying a copy of the item and submitting it for appraisal), but it would be better than just destroying merchandise.
IMO even that’s not nessecary. They are obviously open to anyone and people can sincerely have copies they thought were genuine. If the buyer wants to return it for a refund let them , but even a copy still has some value. It wasn’t like it was a rare collectible worth a thousand or more. Just return it and instruct the seller that they cannot offer that item on ebay.
We had a pair of pioneer headphones that if genuine were worth a little over $200., The seller said they were fakes , which I thought was baloney but still said “Send them back” after the fact I did some research, found a side by sidfe comparison and it appears they might be copies. Who copies headphones that closely? You wouldn’t think it would be that profitable. But as working headphones they still have value so we use them for demos and they are not for sale. The cello still was a working playing cello that had value. There was no reason to destroy it.
I could also see Ebay saying , “if you want the item back you must pay for shipping” but to destroy it without contacting us at all blew my freakin mind.
Yeah, that sounds about right. There was one teenaged boy who answered the door - he got pretty stumped on questions like, “Is your mom home? Is there a better time when I can come back?” What I left unsaid was, “When you’re not so baked?” 
Well there’s your problem. Cthulhu may have telepathy, immortality, and can change his size at will, but remember that Yog Sothoth is the key and the gate. Only Yog Sothoth can solve all your shipping needs
We know reneging on an agreement is unethical. But is it rational behavior? These are arm’s lengths transactions: your reputation doesn’t take a hit when you act like a weasel.
But there’s some evidence that weaseling can work at high levels, reputation be damned. Banks loan money to the elderly then have their reps act surprised when told they have to go through the estate process to collect their debt, or not: “…how are you planning to take care of her balance?.. That’s why we’re in the banking crisis we’re in: banks having to write off defaulted loans.”
Big venture capital groups bid for companies. Then after they win the bid, they amazingly find all sorts of problems with the target, which necessitates a discount. Sorry for dragging in politics, but that was SOP at Romney’s Bain Capital: Here’s how it worked. Private-equity firms are always eager to find companies to buy, allowing them to invest chunks of the billions of dollars entrusted to them and from which they earn hundreds of millions in fees. …
I never negotiated directly with Romney; he was too high-level for any interaction with me. Rather, I dealt often with other Bain senior partners, who were very much in his mold. In my experience, Bain Capital did all that it could to game the system by consistently offering the highest prices during the early rounds of bidding — only to try to low-ball the price after it had weeded out competitors.
By bidding high early, Bain would win a coveted spot in the later rounds of the auction, when greater information about the company for sale is shared and the number of competitors is reduced. …
For buyers, the goal in these auctions is to be one of the few selected to inspect the company’s facilities and books on-site, in order to make a final and supposedly binding bid. …
This is the moment when Bain Capital would become especially crafty. In my experience — which I heard echoed often by my colleagues around Wall Street — Bain would seek to be the highest bidder at the end of the formal process in order to be the firm selected to negotiate alone with the seller, putting itself in the exclusive, competition-free zone. Then, when all other competitors had been essentially vanquished and the purchase contract was under negotiation, Bain would suddenly begin finding all sorts of warts, bruises and faults with the company being sold. Soon enough, that near-final Bain bid — the one that got the firm into its exclusive negotiating position — would begin to fall, often significantly.
…Bain Capital took the art of negotiation over price into the scientific realm. Once the competitive dynamics had shifted definitively in its favor, the firm’s genuine views about what it was willing to pay — often far lower than first indicated — would be revealed.
At such a late date, of course, the seller is more than a little pregnant with the buyer. Attempting to pivot and find a new buyer — which knew it had not been selected in the first place, but was now being called back — would be devastating to the carefully constructed process designed to generate the highest price. Once Bain’s real thoughts about the price were revealed, the seller either had to suck it up and accept the lower price, or negotiate with a new buyer, but with far less leverage.
Needless to say, this does not make for a very happy client… The banker in question eventually stopped doing business with Bain Capital. But the firm did very well and never seemed to lack clients. Weaseling is viable niche for those able to look themselves in the mirror in the morning.