mark o'brien

i’m not a rabid ebay sort of guy, but i have bought a lot of stuff through ebay, and i think it’s a pretty useful way of picking up stuff at a great price.

on the whole, i’ve had mostly excellent experiences with ebay sellers. i’ve had one small hiccup with a person who was new to ebay and who didn’t really know what they were doing, but other than that it’s been smooth sailing. and, i’ve always tended to use paypal for purchases because of the guarantees of having backup should something go wrong. i’ve heard some horror stories of people doing direct debits and then losing decent chunks of money on a seller who was obviously a fraud and did a runner. so, i almost always use paypal for that reason.

and now, i’m getting to see whether paypal is all it’s cracked up to be. i purchased a backup blackberry phone from hong kong in late december because my pearl needed to go in for repairs, but the phone that was sent out to me was faulty and kept shutting down. so, i contacted the company and they said to send it back and they would refund me. and here’s where the fun and games begin. i sent the phone back by registered mail (which would normally take a few days max to get to them), but they claimed for weeks that they hadn’t received the phone back yet. i confirmed they had, and they have promised several times to refund me, but haven’t done so. after getting tired of chasing them since mid-january, i opened a paypal claim against them, but discovered that this is also a long-winded “wait and see” effort. my claim has finally apparently got someone reviewing it, but the communication from paypal about this is minimal, at best.

so, i decided to leave negative feedback on the seller, having got tired of more promises about paying me money back over the past fortnight. boy, did that suddenly get some action! i got an email from the seller telling me that a) they hadn’t received the phone yet (which is a lie, since they already confirmed to me that they had received it), and b) they would refund me after i removed the negative feedback, and again lots of promises and asking me to trust them, which i thought was a bit of a joke at this point in the game.

i was actually surprised that the negative feedback (from a seller who has massive numbers in the feedback area) suddenly provoked a response and an attempt to blackmail me into removing it in order to get my money back. i told them that trust had long since disappeared, and i’m still waiting now on paypal to sort this out, so it’s an interesting experiment. so far, i’m not inspired with any great hope due to the lack of communication with a real person from paypal.

so, i have been well and truly dinked around on this deal, and i’m curious to see whether the great paypal is up to scratch. if not, i’m going to go after them with visa, since that’s who the payment was actually made through into paypal, and the credit card companies are also meant to go after fraudulent activities like this, but i guess we’ll see. i’ll let you know how it goes. it wasn’t a huge amount of money, so i suppose if i never see it again, so be it – but, you’d like to think that there are some real protections offered through services like paypal whose marketing tag is “the safer, easier way to pay”… we’ll see…