Item never received / Refunded and item turns up a month later. What do I do?

[4bytes]

Hello, a month ago nearlly around this time I purchased an item from a seller located in the same state as me and it was *estimated that the item I purchased would arrive the next week (I purchased on a Wednesday in June, item said it wasn't going to arrive until the next wednesday / Thursday comes around). I was provided with a tracking number two days after I ordered but unfortuantly it never updated outside of "Shipping infomation received by Australia post". The day it was due to arrive came and gone, I got in touch with the seller opening an INR case (Item not received) and I'd said that I had been watching the provided tracking number and it hasn't updated since two days after I purchased the item and fearing the item was lost or not coming I decided to go for a full refund. 

The seller got in touch with me 3 days later and apoligised for the delay and said they'd check with the post office (Australia post) and it was "missing scan" and I was asked by the seller to wait until the middle of the week to see if it would arrive then which I'm happy to do. Things happen.

The middle of the week again comes and goes, tracker is still saying "Shipping infomation received by Australia post" and I respond to the case again saying it still hasn't arrived and I'd waited more than enough time for it to be sent to me. Seller apoligised again and then issued me a refund (as requested) and asked if It was to arrive could I send it back, all the while the day I got the refund the tracker still hadn't updated. Case was auto closed after I got my refund and thought that'll be the end of that (I'd since gotten a similar item from another seller and it arrived without fuss) 

I'd stopped looking at the tracking number not long after I was refunded. But today while checking my emails I got an email from Australia post that my item is being delivered, I was puzzled at first what was going on and what it was but luckilly I'd kept the tracking number on a sticky note on my PC and put two and two together and it was the item I'd been long refunded on that I thought was never going to come.

Note: When I purchased this item I opted for Click&Collect at a retailer near me. As I'm about to finish this post I got another email saying it had been delivered to my C&C retailer of choice. 

I'm a honest person, I'm not out to rip rip anyone off but I am a newbie to this side of things and have had 99% of my ebay purchases go well (this being the 1% fluff up).  

What do I do?

The case has been closed, it's not right of me to keep an item I've been refunded on, how do I get the money and or item back to the seller and make sure I don't get bent or screwed over? 

I've read on sending them money through paypal and explaining the item turned up but not sure if that's the safest thing to do. Don't want Paypal or Ebay coming back and biting me. But if that's what needs to be done, that's what needs to be done. 

Any advice? 

[eol-products]

How much is the item worth. It is is under $10 it is not worth returning.

[davewil1964]

So what is the lowest amount at which your principles and morals kick in?

The amount is irrelevant.

[lyndal1838]

This is exactly what I said last week.....return the item to the seller when it arrived as the buyer had already been refunded.

Just abandoning the parcel is hardly returning.  If I was the seller you would be going on my blocked bidders list as a buyer who got a refund and still kept the item.

[*tippy*toes*]

I think the confusion was that if you abandoned the parcel at the post office, it would get sent back after a period of time (It can vary due to being a My Post customer, or even being a regular (they won't send any of my parcels back)). It appears not to be the case with C&C, despite others saying that it was the case.

[brerrabbit585]

If the buyer has to make a special trip to Big W and it's going to cost almost as much as the item's worth I don't see it as stealing to do nothing about returning. The whole fiasco isn't their fault.

Has the seller paid for the item to be returned? If it's collected and taken to the PO they could well want the buyer to pay to return it, rather than just put Return to Sender on it. Ordinarily, yes, they might put RTS on it but maybe c&c items are different.

Having worked in Big W, I know a lot of the staff aren't going to give a toss about what happens to the parcel. It sounds like they couldn't do anything even if they did care.

[eol-products]

Your time is obviously worth a lot less then I value mine.

[davewil1964]

I don't put a price on doing the right thing.

[countessalmirena]

(Replying to davewil's comment because I agree with the stance that one doesn't put a price on doing the right thing.)

What is morally right is sometimes inconvenient. The inconvenience doesn't negate the morality of it.

4bytes has said " When I purchased this item I opted for Click&Collect at a retailer near me", so hopefully it's not going to inconvenience the OP. (It would be different if 4bytes had suffered some sort of injury or contracted an illness in the interim which would make getting around close to impossible.)

I don't think I can accept a position that states that if the item is worth less than $10, it's not worth returning. If we accept that position, surely the corollary is that the OP shouldn't bother about getting a refund for an item worth less than $10. I don't think any of us consider that to be an acceptable stance.

We don't even know the price of the item, so it's difficult to make any sort of "acceptable loss" argument. Furthermore, it isn't for me to decide on someone else's behalf that a particular loss is acceptable. In fact, we know that the seller, in issuing a refund, "asked if It was to arrive could [the OP] send it back". The seller either doesn't want to or cannot afford to write this off. It's reasonable to assume that the seller was asking the OP to RTS, which would mean no postage cost for the buyer.

It would be easy to convince oneself that it's too much trouble and it's the seller's fault and so on. Human nature makes it easy. Anyone who's ever spent a considerable portion of time being present (in whatever capacity it may be) at civil litigation cases or criminal cases will have heard and seen how flexible and acrobatic is the human ability to formulate self-justifying arguments. But if we do this in small things, we'll do it in big things. Practice is key. It's not about being holier than thou, or precious; it's just about applying a rule of fairness predicated upon valuing other people as deserving of consideration and equity as one is oneself, and that can be learned and practiced until it sticks. The parable of the faithful steward is probably the most famous example of this.

Darn it... I've had to call for emergency helicopters and cranes and S.W.A.T. teams to prise me away from the keyboard. Once I start typing... No, no, wait, I just want to type another sentence ... another word... NO, stop!!

We interrupt this post to advise that the poster has been carried away with still-moving fingers, desperately pleading that there's a full-length essay in this topic. Not our business. We've extracted her. Mission complete.

[springyzone]

---

@4bytes wrote:

I went to the Click & Collect store I had the item originally sent too and had them mark the item as "Return to sender". I didn't pick it up or collect it, simply told them to mark & return it to the sender. 

I've messaged the seller telling them I had the retailer mark it as return to sender. I've recived no further messages from the seller today, last message was yesterday. 

---

I find this interesting as you actually went into the store and the workers there must have agreed to do as you asked. No one piped up and said nope, we don't return parcels. You would think if they are working in that department they would know the procedure. Maybe ring & double check as the store may actually return parcels, no matter what the ebay small print says.

I also find it very high handed that any store or ebay would accept a system where if someone does not collect within a certain number of days, it is deemed that the item can be thrown out or donated to charity. Not acceptable. It would certainly turn me off choosing click & collect. I had no idea they did that, would have assumed they returned to sender.

The question of morals I think also has to be a bit practical and quite often the dollar amount will influence just how much effort a buyer (or a seller) is willing to put in or bother with.  I'm not suggesting that any buyer has the right to the item plus a refund.

But we're talking here of an item that did not arrive till a month after the purchase & where the buyer had to go and buy another one.

Then the buyer is expected to make a special trip to pick up said item, even though he does not want or need it and now has no right to it.

Okay, he can do that but quite frankly, since the seller has not bothered to send a label through yet, I'd be inclined to message them, tell them that the policy at the store may be that items don't get returned to sender but dumped, but I could still pick up the item immediately if they were interested in getting it back, but they needed to send through the return postage label.

I'm not picking up the vibe the seller is that fussed. Maybe as someone else said, the return postage cancels out a lot of the gains. But offer them the chance. If no postage label is forthcoming though, let it go. 

[brerrabbit585]

The person in the store who said it's okay may not have known anything about how the system works. They could have been relieving someone else on their tea break, but even if they work in that section all the time, they may not get many c&c items, or they personally may never had to deal with an item that wasn't collected. That step in the process could be (and probably is) someone else's responsibility.

For those who think it's immoral not to go out of their way to make sure the seller gets it back, the seller chose to offer click & collect and even if they don't know the risks, the risks are still part of the terms they accept when they agree to it, in the same way that the rest of us accept the risk of a buyer making a claim under the MBG when we list on ebay.

Just because the buyer lives 'nearby' doesn't mean they can easily get there when the store is open. They may be in a wheelchair and need to get a lift, they may work full-time and have to take special time off work to get there. Yes, they originally chose to have it delivered to Big W but just because they were prepared to make a special effort to collect the item, it may not be as easy for them to do it now as it was a month ago. I'm not saying any of these things are the case, but saying they're morally responsible isn't necessarily true, especially if this is a replacement item that the seller sent without it being agreed to.