@digital*ghost wrote:
@springyzone wrote:
How long before that expectation becomes unreasonable,
Legally, consumer guarantees do not apply to goods from non-businesses (new or secondhand), so reasonable expectation should only come into it if buying from a business seller. I'm not too familair with what kinds of guarantees sellers of SH electrical equipment need to provide, though.
Philisophically (I guess? but also literally) speaking, no matter whether an item lasts for one year or 50 after it is first purchased brand new, there always a 2 weeks before, a 1 day before, and a 5 minutes before it stops working (or develops an issue, even if otherwise working). There is never a way to guarantee (in the literal sense) that a buyer hasn't bought an item that is in that moment a perfectly working item, but conicidentally 5 minutes before that problem occurs, so when buying from a non-business seller, a buyer should be aware (and accept) that it's luck of the draw.
Any buyer who uses the eBay / PayPal dispute system in that kind of scenario probably believes they are enforcing their rights, because who needs to be aware of - or care about - the other person's rights if you can just force your will on another person with the help of corporations who also act like they are completely unaware of rights if they belong to the seller of the item, plus, that ignorance would allow one to complain that they can't give the seller a neg for their troubles as well, cos time ran out. (For all intents and purposes, this is a fictional scenrario - though I am sure it has happened multiple times over the years, I am not saying any poster here has done or wished to be able to do this, my intention is to highlight what those actions actually are to those that find themselves in similar scenarios).
PayPal, at least, make it clear the protection only applies to the item in it's received-in condition. I expect that this gets thrown out the window a lot, but any buyer trying an INAD claim several (up to 6) months after the purchase, is going to have a much more difficult time winning.
I think the difficulty in the scenario you mentioned is that a seller of a second hand item may indeed test it and find it working, yet when the buyer receives it, it may have died in the meantime.
But from the buyer's point of view, they cannot know for sure that the seller really did test it properly. All they know is that an item that was advertised as good working order wasn't working when they received it. So in that sense, when the item was received, it wasn't as described.
As I said, this is one of the problematical things on ebay that would make me hesitate to sell second hand items on ebay that could be prone to break down.
As instyle mentioned, buyers are given 6 months with paypal in which to make a claim. Like you, I think if you were trying to claim for not as described, you'd have to be able to make a case as to why it had taken so long, or so I would hope.
With a second hand item that broke down almost immediately when it was used, although a buyer cannot expect a guarantee off a private seller, I strongly suspect the buyer would think the item probably had that fault when it was sold, even if the seller had not picked up on it, and would claim INAD. And it's hard to say who is right and wrong there.
At a market, garage sale, that sort of thing, a buyer can ask to see something working. If they buy and take it away and it breaks down next day, they have no comeback but then again, they saw for themselves it had been working. On ebay it is a bit different, people can only take the condition on trust from the description so i can understand some leeway.
