Sellers offering any guarantee greater than 180 days on eBay laugh at us buyers as eBay and paypal will not pursue them to honour their Guarantee / Warranty period.
How many eBay buyers have been and are being ripped off by this warranty scam?
Come on eBay support those who support you!
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You're not the first buyer to be disappointed by a 'warranty' that isn't honoured. You won't be the last.
It is very misleading to read in an ad that there is a 2 year warranty and then find it is worthless.
I've been trying to think of things ebay could do to lessen the likelihood of this problem happening.
First thing that comes to mind is they could ban all mention of warranties in the actual body of the ad and instead make that info a separate sub-box section that a seller has to fill in, with length of warranty & country of origin of warranty.
This section could contain an ebay generated sentence to the effect that any warranty is not enforceable by ebay and to note that there can sometimes be problems claiming on foreign warranties.
I don't think this would necessarily stop buyers from buying, but they couldn't claim they didn't know the score.
Ebay already has computer programs that can pick up on any whiff of a mention of contact details that might lead to an off ebay transaction, so they could probably devise a program that could pick up on any unauthorised warranty references in an ad.
The second thing that comes to mind is they could look at individual complaints such as yours and where they find a seller has failed to honour a warranty, they could impose sanctions. Probably the best sanction here would be if a seller did not honour an Australian customer, their ads could no longer be visible on Australian ebay.
As a buyer, I quite like this solution but I can see why ebay wouldn't. They aren't interested in becoming mediators in warranty disputes. It can be a grey area. Not saying your case is, but generally speaking, probably not easy & more to the point, time consuming( it costs ebay money, for an operator to read through all messages & hard for ebay to ensure that operators would consistently come to the same conclusion.)
It's not going to happen. On past form, I'd say ebay is after as little human intervention as it can manage. So much is automated now & that's the way they like it.
Third thing (and countess made me think of this). Where an ad mentions a warranty in years, perhaps the paypal coverage could extend out to one year, with a money back guarantee for 'not as described'. After all, if an item is advertised as being guaranteed for 2 years, then if it breaks down in one year, that doesn't fit the description in the ad. I think that is fairly unlikely to happen too as it is only in recent years paypal went to 180 days.
The system would have to be fairly automated and in the buyer's favour & there would be plenty of potential for it to be misused by some buyers, causing seller resentment.
You ask ebay to support those who support it, but the problem is they get quite a bit of revenue from sellers too, in the way of fees etc so call me cynical, but I can't see them rushing to put sellers offside either unless they have to.
So yes, I think warranties mentioned in ads can be a problem, but your chances of getting ebay to change aren't great.
My attitude is pretty much that if i want to buy anything on ebay, to disregard any mention of warranty and decide if it is still worth it.
Not ideal, but if you have cynical expectations you won't be let down.
