i am soooo peeved!

 

i’ve been a member of ebay for over 10 years now and when i lived in LA i even occasionally sold things on the site. for all this time i assumed that my purchases where automatically covered  – that no matter what i bought, should anything go wrong, i could always get my money back.

well, be careful of assuming things. there’s a reason they say that to assume anything, makes an ass of of u and me. 

one needs to be sure to read the fine-print. turns out you have only 45 days after a transaction is made, to lay a complaint. now those of us who live here on the other side of the world, know that it can sometimes take 45 days just for an item to get to one’s mailbox. it took 2 months for an item i had ordered from hong kong to arrive so i’m speaking from experience.

my item was ordered may 3rd. keeping the mail service in mind, i sent my first query on june 21st. the seller said please wait, it’s coming. i gave it another almost 3 weeks and sent another query. this time the seller said the package had been returned and they had sent it back out. please wait. give it another week and if the item has still not arrived, they’ll refund me my money. now, despite the fact that i had spent over $200 on this item, i still much rather wanted the item, rather than a refund, so i did what they asked. i waited. in fact i gave it 2 more weeks before i finally gave up. it had been 3 months since i’d paid for the item and it obviously wasn’t arriving.

i sent an email reluctantly asking for the promised refund only to be met with deafening silence. no reply from the seller. i waited a week. i checked my paypal account.

nada.

tonight i decided to open a case on ebay. HOWEVER… it turns out that after 45 days you have no recourse other than contacting the seller. you can also no longer leave feedback on the item you bought. wtf?! and when you try to find a way to contact ebay, you keep getting referred to their support pages. no email. no phone number. finally after about half an hour of clicking through various links, i found a number by clicking on a link to lay a complaint against a buyer, not a seller! it seems that ebay doesn’t want you to contact them and seems to favor the seller – it’s only sheer resilience that got me that number. and then i had to hold on skype listening to muzak for at least 10 minutes before i got to speak to anyone.

anyway.

the agent (who is obviously in india somewhere – when i asked what time it was there, he said to wait, he’d go and find out!) said they’d escalate the case, however they make no promises as to whether i’ll get a refund or not.

so.

now i wait.

some more.

turns out, yet again, that my patience might not be such a virtue after all. caveat emptor!