Whats wrong with PayPal?

I think we are talking about two different things.

You are referring to valid adverts where there has been conflict between buyer and seller. I agree, that's nothing to do with eBay.

I am talking about the repeated bogus adverts that keep reappearing. I have only ever sold one expensive item on eBay (ATC's for £1300). That was 4 months ago and my advert, pictures and word for word text are still appearing in scam adverts.

I agree that eBay should not be held responsible for the one off scam adverts, but when they repeatedly run the same scam advert month after month (after being informed of what's happening), something has seriously gone wrong in my view.

 

Andy

What is the outcome of your claims for the ATC and PMC?

Hon

 

I always buy and sell with PayPal. Infact I won't bid on something I want if the seller does not do PayPal.

ebay is a conduit. They charge you a small fee in order to get your product out to MILLIONS of people every day. If you car to read the T&Cs before clicking that accept button you would know exactly where you stand.

 

Hon, Oh that.

The ATC claim was finally sorted after UPS gave in so the buyer got his money back.

My claim on the PMC's was a disaster. Recall that I organised the courier to pick them up from the seller in England. That arrangement meant I had to rely on the seller to correctly fill in the UPS Waybill but he didn't write the £1400 amount in the "declared value" box. UPS were only required to pay me the maximum uninsured value of £350.

I have managed to fix the cabinets and they appear to work fine. I won't ever be able to sell them though.

After all that my interest in HiFi is seriously diminished and I just plan to stick with Squeezeboxes and small scale actives in the future.

I write-it off as one of lifes learning experience, £1000 down the drain!!!!!

Andy

 

Yes, you stand in ****! But even if you realise it after reading the T&C there is little other option to sell things these days. They have a monopoly and in my opinion they are starting to abuse it.

Holy crap Andy thats an expensive disaster! I feel for you man!

 

Don't worry Tenson, it could have been worse. At one stage it looked like UPS weren't going to pay out on the ATC's I sent to Spain...imagine that scenario, two failed insurance claims!

The PMC's are going to get trashed to some degree anyway (toddlers in the house) so UPS have just accelerated the whole process for me. Hell, I sometimes give them a little kicken myself just to make myself feel better.

As I said, no more expensive hifi for me. Not worth it with the crap music I listen too anyway.

 

Well Andy I've got to agree with that. I'd be miffed too.

 

Just checked eBay's ATC listings and there's the same pair of SCM20-2 listed TWICE. The actual real auction for them was 3 months ago.

eBay's systems can't even stop the same scam advert being listed a couple of minutes apart!

They just don't care.

 

Around the world there are anything in excess of 15 million auctions starting and finishing.

What would you have them do to care more Andy?

 

Andy

Sorry to hear about the PMC incident which can affect one's interest in a hobby. I was nearly cheated 900 pounds last year by a dodgy ebay seller who never sent me the audio items, but I got my money back at the end.

Hi Fi is fun and most audiophiles I have met are nice people.

Hon

 

Their business concept was always brilliant. I think they would care a lot more though if they had a serious competitor pushing them a bit.

 

it's this simple:

if you want the service and quality you expect from a shop, then you'll have to buy from a shop at shop prices. at least you can go back when there is a problem.

if you try to get a cheap bargain from eBay you should expect the same service you would associate with 'Dodgy Dave's back street garage' when things go wrong.

 

So why don't other exchanges, for argument's sake, the LSE (eBay is goods exchange and price discovery mechanism, just like a stock exchange) turn around and say "we have average daily volume of 1.3bn shares - how can we possibly monitor them all? Of course some dodgy trades will go through and some traders will get stuffed, that's life mate".

I think you'll find that confidence in said exhange would rapidly diminish. If eBay do not have the resources to effectively monitor all transactions, they should reign-back their operations and limit the number of auctions to a certain amount per day. They're obviously waaaaay over-stretched at the moment.

Shame they're not tightly regulated like financial exhanges, but I guess we could always (proxy) vote with our feet....

DT

 

Spot on.

I think in the long term eBay will have to make that very choice.

Look how hard it is to get "certified" on Paypal. If they applied that same process to eBay I assume scam volumes will fall considerably.

But so would their sales volumes.

 

About a year ago or so I saw an episode of crimewatch when they were discussing the pitfalls of ebay where people had conned or had been conned out of substantial sums of money. On the same episode they were warning people about a company who had cheap watches made in Hong Kong or wherever and pretended they were really expensive by making up exotic names for them and putting occasional adverts for them in glossy magazines and using said adverts to convince people that these watches were the real deal. An expert examining the watches suggested they were worth approx. £20, certainly not the £500+ RRP's the company suggested they had and not the £50-75 you could buy them for "as a real bargain" from the dodgy salesmen that peddled them. Hey, guess what, this company sell them by the bucket load on ebay. I emailed ebay to let them know that this seller had been on crimewatch for misleading claims of quality and value on their products, and that they were outright liars and fraudsters and perhaps they should not allow them to sell them on ebay. Suprise suprise, no response, no action....

It's not a shock though, they've now sold in excess of 50,000 watches on ebay, which amounts to a whole lot of commission. I see this as a clear example of ebay not giving a sh1t about fraud as long as they get their cut of the ill-gotten gains.

http://stores.ebay.co.uk/Watches2u-Factory-Outlet

Unfortunately crimewatch didn't do their homework very well and didn't connect these conmen to ebay when they were on within minutes of each other...ho hum

 

yeah, most of the watches are tat - tho, there does seem to be a few known brands there like La Coste (tho, they aren't a watch brand...), but that sh*te like Krug baumen have almost become famous for being crap...you always see their ad's in some mags, but I guess it e-bays defence they aren't strictly breaking the law but morally they stink

 

Hi All

Have read this thread with interest,have only been using e-bay for about 8 months with 120 painless transactions and some very good deals,ie brand new Gryphon catridge demagnetiser for £40.

It would seem they are very slow in removing the "obvious scammers" and these can mostly be easily spotted.

However after I sold my EAR phono stage,I found a spare set of Phillips 83's and placed the add in phono stages/turntables,you no what ?? They quickly removed add as it was not placed correctly,daft or what ??

Such a pity for those who have had bad results as the concept,could,should,be good for all if they put their minds to it,it's a classic case of being to big.

GJO.

 

What you are failing to understand is scammers are not setting up eBay accounts and giving over their details.

Muppets are falling for phishing scams and getting their accounts hijacked.

So again I ask, what would you have eBay do? Perhaps you think they should have a representative for every genuine ebayer to live round their house and insure they arn't stupid enough to fall for the 'please sign in' eBay email?

As for second hand goods which turn out not to be as expected. Taking Tensions example, he was not scammed, the guy did not sell it to him knowing it was going to fail in a few months time. This is cavet empor. You have a product it failed, it was second hand the guy selling is just 'Another Guy™' sat in his semi selling some stuff he don't want anymore.

This is not eBays fault, it upheld its end of the bargain perfectly, it advertised the product for seven days and enabled the transaction to happen.

If any of you are not happy with this, its so very simple, buy elsewhere. You are just a **** in a storm because for 99.99% of everyone else eBay is great for what it is.

And yes a cartridge should be able to take 3 grams. In the good old days a 2 pence piece was stuck on the end of the arm to give it 'more bass' that brings it up to around 5g before the counter weight. 1.5g is the recommended weight. If it had little compliance its because it was very very old and should not have been sold as excellent.

Here we have two sides of the story.

 

Gary, actually he was not 'just another guy' as he lied in the advert. No-one in there right mind could buy a refurbished camera and use it heavily (I think he is a pro) and then sell it a year or whatever later still claiming the condition to be 'recently refurbished'. I doubt he was trying to con me, just spicing up the advert a little bit, but he got caught because the camera developed a fault. Did PayPal do anything? No, because the supporting documents I provided from Nikon were not on letter headed paper, though they were completely verifiable from their reference number and the manager’s name on it.

The MAXIMUM weight for the cartridge was 1.5g so you don't know what you are talking about. Even the person who placed the advert admitted to Rob they read the wrong instructions.

GJO, thats very interesting because I placed an advert and the second category was incorrect (my mistake but it was not obvious when selecting). I wrote to them to get it changed and they refused saying it would ruin the buyers experience as one person had bid £5 for my PMC’s. Apparently it would ruin there experience if they found out the active speakers were not really computer recording software! So I had to pay £40 for an extra category I didn't even want. This is what I mean by eBay not being reasonable; why not just change it when it is OBVIOUSLY wrong?

 

Tension, how they heck did you manage to spend forty quid on a second catagory? That costs 12p to everyone else??

If I may offer just one piece of advice because I have had a number of issues with listings I placed. I usually list with a programme I have to bypass using the web. However it developed a fault and I listed 30 items twice. Although I could delete them I would be charged the listing fees.

Anyhow my advice is to contact eBay via their online chat facility. You have to wait to be put through but its rarely longer than ten minutes and basically its like MSN and you chat with a real live human working for eBay! They are usually much more forthcoming 'face to face' as it were.