Promotions and refunds

Anonymous
Not applicable

Let's say a promotion is buy 4 items and get 40% off.

What is the refund level if one item is returned ?

Answer is the item price less 40% of course but....

in order to get the discount the buyer had to purchase 4 items.

Now that the buyer will only have 3 items in their possession

should the refund be 'less' the discount given on the other items ?

 

Promotions of this type are easily open to abuse.

The buyer could purchase 1 expensive item, return 3 cheap items

and end up with the expensive item at 40% off.

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Promotions and refunds

Anonymous
Not applicable

The main reason for my question is to determine how ebay handles

the return of promoted items.

I haven't had it happen yet and I am curious.

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Promotions and refunds

whenever I have received discount vouchers from eBay the terms and conditions normally address what happens in the case of returns.

 

As for buying 4 items and getting 40% off, I have not ever seen that offer.

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Promotions and refunds

I think the OP means sellers' store promotions, not ebay vouchers
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Promotions and refunds

Anonymous
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Yes

Buy 4 items and get 40% off was just an example.

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Promotions and refunds

okay, thanks for that, scrap my previous post

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Promotions and refunds

I think it should depend on the reason for the return.

If the item was not as described then they should get the refund less the 40% but keep the discount on the other items.  They bought in good faith so not their fault the item had to be returned.

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Promotions and refunds

Anonymous
Not applicable

Absolutely Lyndal.

It's the COM scenario I was curious about and how the ebay software

would handle it.

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Promotions and refunds

I've never seen a discount offer like that on ebay but I once bought some items at a place where if you bought 3, you could have a 4th up to the value of $99 for half price.

I didn't really want a 4th item so bought something as a birthday present for my sister & put it aside although I did get my sister to try it on (it was a clothing store).

I then did have a change of mind & needed to return all 3 of my items, which was okay, but what happened to me was I was refunded n full but then had to rebuy the 4th item at full price. (which was fine & what I had expected to happen).

 

My other option would have been to just return all 4 items & I would have been refunded in full what I paid.

But I could not have returned any or all items and have kept the 4th item at half price.

 

As we're talking about what would happen in the case of an ebay transaction,  and a seller isn't in a situation where they can necessarily get more money out of a customer after the deal, I would expect that if a customer bought 4 items and wanted to return only one cheap item (as a change of mind) then I think the seller would be within rights to ask for all items to be returned for a full refund or else the item could be returned and a refund, minus the overall 40% discount, given. If that didn't cover the cost of the item, the seller could explain that.

 

 

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Promotions and refunds


@Anonymous wrote:

The main reason for my question is to determine how ebay handles

the return of promoted items.

I haven't had it happen yet and I am curious.


Discounts are apportioned across all items generally, unless the seller sets up a promotion to do otherwise.

 

For example, in a buy 4 get one free scenario, the buyer will have to add 5 items to their cart in order to qualify. Let's say the items are $10 each, so when all 5 eligible items are in the cart, the total becomes $40, but each item is priced at $8 instead of 4 items being priced at $10 and one at $0, so in the event of a return, the buyer would get an $8.00 refund, no matter which one they returned. I ran a buy one get one free promotion a while back, on an $9.00 item, and each item was actually priced at $4.50 for those who took it up. 

 

The same usually applies on percentage discounts - if the offer was buy one, get one at 20% off, in reality each item would be 10% off in so far as how the discount (and any subsequent refunds) are handled. On buy X get X% off promotions, the seller can change how the discount is applied if they wanted to, so that the qualifying items are full price and the last one has the entire discount applied. The same applies to specified value discounts (eg buy X item, get $20 off this other item - a $10 discount will actually be applied to each item,. unless the seller specifies otherwise). 

 

According to eBay, you can also set up your return policy to disallow partial returns from promotional purchases, but I haven't looked in to that to confirm (they may mean you can write it in manually as a TOS, or that you have to set your return policy to 'no returns'). 

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