@stoph-88 wrote:
Thanks for that. The crux of the problem is that these crooks can open an " office" here in Australia, probably a domestic premises, and keep no stock but rather order everything as it sells from China. The standard lie is "there has been a delay with our courier " - the truth is, the item hasn't arrived from China yet. I love the way certain ppl say "you should check feedback and see where the seller is registered " great. There's no point discussing this here as there are too many sycophants. Its like it all perfectly fine to be deceptive if you're an ebay seller; it's up to the buyer to work out if the seller is a crook and its the buyers fault if the seller acts deceptively. I'm quite happy to be a minority of one honest person. The rest are very welcome to live void of morals. Happy ebaying!
It's true, there are quite a few misleading ads on ebay and ebay doesn't do a great deal to stop them. As countess said, if the sellers are operating from China, a whole different set of rules seems to apply.
The problem as I see it is ebay is not itself selling anything. Ebay is just a website where millions of people and businesses sell their stuff. Most of the sellers are responsible and honest, but some are shifty. Same with the buyers.
The headache for ebay is trying to sort it all out and they could definitely tweak things to do more but I doubt they'll ever completely stamp out every problem.
The way I look at it is that ebay is a slightly risky platform to use, compared to some other sites where you might be dealing with a known seller regularly and know the level of service to expect.
So you have to look out for yourself, to some extent. What I do is look at expected delivery date, feedback and seller registration and I read the ad carefully and go from there. I personally rarely buy from China if I can help it. I did buy once from a seller who was obviously lying about item location and I knew that before I bought but it was the only place I could find the particular second hand item. I bitterly resented being lied to that way though so I know your frustration.
Yes, ebay is a slightly risky platform, there are some dodgy sellers, ebay doesn't have it under control so if you do use it, just proceed with extreme caution.
PS Although ebay isn't tackling some of the issues well, I think they are well aware of them. I have a friend who attended a breakfast conference with them a couple of years back, where the ebay reps were throwing around some ideas and one was for all (or almost all) items to be housed in ebay warehouses and sold/posted from there. Quick courier delivery.
I am guessing amazon style.
With everything under video so presumably that would cut down on item not as described/didn't arrive/slow to post claims etc. A 5 year implementation time frame.
Obviously none of that has come to pass yet & maybe it never will, but nothing stays the same forever and I think ebay is constantly working on ways to tighten up or improve. They don't always get it right though.
