Seller REMOVED is a thief and eBay doing nothing about it!

[Anonymous]

This seller from south Korea is definitely a thief who has taken my money without delivering the order or refunding!!! More important is, eBay is allowing this kind of of activity.

I will never shop on this platform again, and trusting any thing from south Korea.  

[countessalmirena]

@anch-8276, as has been posted here, contacting eBay for help now - 8 months later - will be fruitless. eBay have neither a legal nor a moral obligation to assist you so far down the track. I'm really sorry about your situation; US$300 is a lot of money to lose.

Hard as it is to hear, you put yourself in this situation. Did you not know about the timeframe for lodging a dispute under eBay's MBG? If you did, you would have known that you had no remedy past 30 days of the EDD. If you didn't, then you were cavalier about that $300 by not reading eBay's help page about the MBG.

eBay's complaint process and MBG process - and indeed every process - is almost entirely bot-driven. If you miss lodging a dispute by 1 second, it's too late. That is why it is impossible to lodge the dispute now - it's impossible in practical terms.

eBay have the bot-driven processes in place because they don't want to have humans at the forefront of handling complaints or listening to pleading buyers or sellers. That's clear. That must be partly due to the cost of employing enough humans to handle such complaints and investigating refund claims, but it's also due to the process being very simple and there being no room for someone 3 months later trying to get a refund. Humans can be swayed; bots/computer processes can't be.

I reiterate my previous point; there is no protection for a claim that an item hasn't arrived if the buyer doesn't act to report the issue within a reasonable timeframe. A reasonable timeframe is defined differently by different bodies, but eBay are legally permitted to limit their voluntary MBG (it's not required by law) to one month after estimated date of delivery. PayPal as a financial institution offer a more generous timeframe, but even that is strictly to the very second. SIX MONTHS is long enough for a buyer to realise that the item isn't coming.

Credit card providers/banks have varying timeframes for allowing a dispute on a credit card. It will be in the T&Cs of your card provider. For some, it's 2 months; it might be 3 months for some; the very longest timeframe of which I'm aware is six months (same as PayPal). I have never heard of a bank allowing a dispute after that timeframe.

You seem to have interpreted the AliExpress (and Taobao) examples incorrectly. If the seller doesn't actually follow through with processing and sending the order, or if the seller cancels the order, you will apparently be refunded. It works in a similar but not identical way on eBay. But if the AliExpress seller has SENT the item to you, but you actually don't receive it, you have to open a dispute yourself. It is not done for you.

To be protected, I really urge you to inform yourself of all the timeframes involved in the event that you need to open a dispute. Protect yourself, and don't be strung along by a seller. We don't know whether your seller did despatch the item; the seller didn't have to prove it, because you didn't lodge a dispute. If the seller did despatch the item, it's got lost somewhere in transit. That's not an unthinkable possibility, given that COVID-19 has sent supply chains and deliveries and lives into chaos globally.

I have had some items take longer to arrive than I expected or hoped. I have learned to act before the cut-off time for taking remedial action. The usual time for which I would wait for something nowadays is 3 months, and I enter tasks into my iPhone calender to remind me in good time once an item hasn't arrived by the EDD, so that I don't let the time slip by before I can open a dispute if I need to do so.

On behalf of family members, I've had a chargeback performed once; for myself, it's also been once. I opened a PayPal dispute for some rare French mugs once, and was willing to close the dispute if the seller could show me a tracking number indicating that the items had been desptached; once the seller replied that they hadn't despatched the items because they were waiting for them to arrive from the manufacturer, it was game over because I knew the manufacturer was no longer making these - hence it was "Please refund me within 48 hours".

I did once wait for... well, it was definitely more than 3 months ... a hard-to-get CD recording which the seller for some insane reason sent by ship. I kept in touch with the seller over that long period, and took a chance on trusting the seller; I would have had only my card provider as an option if the ship sank with my precious CD on board.

There is a significant difference between "SENT" and "DELIVERED".

There is also a significant difference between being refunded for a cancelled order and being refunded for an order that just never arrived after having been sent (or presumably having been sent). In the latter case, I can only repeat my previous position; you yourself must in such a case open a dispute within the allowed timeframes. Never ever let yourself wait for longer than 6 months at most, and in fact, you should always give yourself a little leeway - say, 7 days before the timeframe runs out.

Good luck and I hope that your credit card provider / bank will give you even more leeway and provide you with a refund.

[aga036]

Perhaps not in your case @anch-8276. but perhaps? 

I only have a Post Office Box as I live rural remote. It took me some time to figure out why goods from China weren't arriving as the Courier Company FastWay didn't deliver to Post Office Boxes.

The Parcel would come to the closest city and then be sent back. 

I discovered that paying a fee to the Post Office $26 for 50 deliveries, you call your box number a  Suite number and FastWay will deliver to the Post Office. 

[springyzone]

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@Anonymous wrote:

the seller said the delivery was not available from south korea due to COIVD19. and, I agreed to wait for the order until the service is back again, but asking the to keep me posted, but after almost 8 months. the seller didn't offer me any update or willing to refund. Clearly, this bad seller is taking the advantage of ebay policy and using my trust to earn my $300 us dollar without doing anything. By the way, this doggy seller used to blame myself and ebay!!!

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If you paid $US300, that is some serious money too much to risk losing.

Now I know you may never use ebay again but wherever you buy from and whoever you buy from, you need to remember one important thing.

It is a business transaction.

You need to treat it as such. You didn't treat the ebay purchase as a business transaction. Instead of keeping to the business guidelines provided by ebay, you decided to place 'trust' in  a seller. You can't afford to do that, not on ebay, not anywhere.

That doesn't mean your transaction can't be pleasant or that things have to get nasty.

The minute the seller told you your item could not be sent because of covid, you should have replied that in that case you would like a cancellation and refund and perhaps if the item was available later, you might re-buy then.

That way, if you didn't get a timely refund, you could have opened an ebay claim and got all your money back.

You deliberately decided to take a risk. If the item had been worth, say, $20 or $30, you might be able to justify the risk, but for $US300, no way.

You say the seller is dodgy and there could be other buyers like you, who have flown under the radar because they have let things go too late and now they can't leave feedback etc. Yes, that could be so, although I doubt there would be too many of them.

Just to sum up: You weren't dealing with a huge, solid, well known Australian company, where you may be able to pre order something and wait months and legitimatewly expect all to go well.

You were dealing with an unknown, smaller overseas seller.

Always, always, keep things to a business transaction and never agree to leave behind the terms and conditions of sale and go into some vague 'friendly' agreements.