@e_purchasing wrote:
If you sold a Large A4 French Vintage Chocolate Stencil Template and the buyer accidentally received Large A4 Paris/Florals Stencil Template all because ie you weren't thinking straight at the time of packing and posting. Would you want the buyer to lodge an item not as described dispute or would you want them just to notify you of the situation and allow you to rectify it without a dispute?
No need to answer as I know which it would be.
So why advise someone to open a dispute off the bat rather than communicate the problem and seek resolution?
Why are so many on these boards hell bent and quick on advice towards creating a divide between buyers and sellers rather than amicable communication first?
I have mixed feelings about this, but mostly because of how eBay morphed what opening an INAD "dispute" does, stuff like automatically awarding sellers with a non-removable strike that contributes to an unquantified metric that allows eBay to go "hmm, yes, other unspecified sellers similar to you have had less disputes opened against them, so we're now going to charge you an extra 4% on top of the fees you already pay".
I put "dispute" in quotation marks, though, because from the buyer's side, more often than not they are intending to just open the lines of communication, and sellers can choose to see it that way too, if they wanted to (it took me a while, but I worked to get myself to that point...mostly, I'm not sure if I'll ever not have that initial twinge when an notification comes through that a request has been opened).
PayPal's framing from both sides was very much adversarial, eBay's....isn't, but it's hard to let go of that initial 'brain training', and sometimes it's hard not to resent buyers for what eBay do as a result of them clicking "contact seller" then selecting "item doesn't match description" as the subject. (I'm speaking in general of course, there are buyers who know the system and go out of their way to message first, your average buyer won't know this is an automatic dispute, though).
The advice to intentionally open a dispute the second something isn't quite right, I agree it's not ideal when there's no indication the seller acted in any questionable way, and not recommended if the seller is otherwise trusted and a replacement is preferred (I will never send a replacement with an open request), but at the same time, a buyer's protection can be compromised if they try to sort it out with the seller outside of the official channels, so there can be a level of not wishing to be responsible for someone losing out on everything by encouraging that.
Re: the OP - does the image on the wrong cover match the image when you bought? I'm not a car person, so all I see is an identical car model except for one letter, so if I googled one and got images of the other I wouldn't have a clue lol, so I'm just wondering if the item title had a typo rather than the image being different to what was displayed at point of purchase. I'm not saying that makes it ok or to just let it go, just that I can see how an error like that could easily be made.
