No, not yet, though I suppose I might at some point (in fact, if I keep eBaying at my current levels, it’s practically guaranteed). I guess my whole thing has always been that I don’t understand this stand-off that sometimes occurs because no one wants to leave feedback first. Obviously, you’ve solved that, by agreeing to leave feedback as soon as the buyer has communicated with you that the item was received and satisfactory. I may have to adapt that stance.
As for the “mark as dispatched” feature, I just recently got back into eBaying after a hiatus while recovering from surgery, and haven’t ever used it. Maybe it’s time to start.
Well, you are alone in that. There are quite a few sellers who insist the buyer leave feedback first- many say exactly what you say. So, to test this, I send a message to them as soon as I have rcvd my good, saying I got it, all is well, thanks. So far this has resulted in FB about 1% of the time. (my rating is over 400 as a buyer all POS)
Now I leave very nice FB for those sellers who don’t beleive in “feedback with-holding”, as soon as I get it.
Yes, stuff sometimes happens, but eBay is based upon trust. The buyer is trusting the seller with his $$, so the seller can trust the buyer with a little FB.
If I was a big-time seller, I would not leave FB first for those buyers with a history of leaving NEGs or those who are new, sure.
I don’t have anything to add here, really. I just wanted to congratulate the OP on a successful dispute resolution with an asinine seller. Here’s hoping your future eBay transactions are much smoother.
Could I send you a a link through PM so I can maintain some slight anonymity? I just noticed yesterday that I left the seller’s name in their ‘refund policy’ that I quoted in post #1. Oh well, screw 'em.
Thank you. I’m relieved that the effort and stress over trying to resolve this paid off. I’ve had 125+ on eBay transactions and this is the first one to cause me much hassle. Overall, I’ve been very fortunate I think.
There are a few reasons for this. eBay’s feedback system is not particularly well-designed. The biggest reasons why people do this are:
The penalty for an additional negative is generally much greater than the reward for an additional positive. This makes people very reluctant to leave feedback first, since as long as they haven’t left feedback, they have something to hold against potential bad feedback left against them.
The seller’s reputation is more important than the buyer’s, both because there are more professional sellers than professional buyers, and because buyers take on more risk by paying first.
As to the question of using a credit card over a paypal balance: I always use a credit card, both because I get rewards stuff for it, and because in the event of a dispute, I trust my credit card company to stand up for me more than I trust paypal.
Unfortunately I’ve had to dispute a couple transactions over the years (as buyer). For all the shit that paypal gets talked about them, much of which I’m sure is deserved, they’ve come through for me in all cases with my money back. Ultimately I wonder if the seller too gets dinged for the money or if it’s just absorbed into paypal’s bottom line (and subsequently customer fees) a la credit card fraud.
You’re right - it does seem to be quite common amongst sellers to simply state it as ‘buyer must leave feedback first’ - I’m not quite sure what it is they’re afraid of. My motive is only to ensure that my feedback accurately reflects the whole of the transaction experience and I do explicitly say… wait… here’s the exact wording of my comp slip:
And I do make good on this - a few of my buyers put it to the test just this week.
I understand and I do actually significantly trust my buyers - I rarely bother with recorded delivery methods and I quite often send items before cheques have cleared, I just want the feedback I leave to be completely representative of the whole transaction - in fact part of it is that I’m desperate to be able to say something other than ‘fast payment, good ebayer, A+++’ on each and every transaction. This way I sometimes get to mention communication or friendly manner.
My experience of dealing directly with EBay was not good, I reported fraudulent software and they sent back silly Emails advizing me to ‘be vigilant’ - obvious code for ‘dumb vigilante’
Mind you when I proved a guy was shilling, they acted like a shot.
(my rating is over 400 as a buyer all POS)