What is the best way to insulate yourself from a buyer that tears up a product (motherboard) and ends up filing a return request for (defective product sold as working)? This was a as-is listing…I stopped doing 30 day returns because of this once before.
I sold a motherboard to a guy that after the sale was over had a several of questions that immediately indicated a lack of any kind of skill level. Then of course magically the board has bint pins. I myself can never recall ever binding a cpu pin. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen but I think you just about have to be installing it wrong or otherwise doing something you shouldn’t do.
So anyway Ebay wants me to buy shipping to have the buyer to send the board he no doubt broke back. I reckon I will try to contact ebay and try to contest this.
Unfortunately when you get a buyer like this, there’s nothing you can really do. eBay sides with the buyer 99.9% of the time in “item not as described” returns. It doesn’t to eBay matter how many photos you took of the item, or if you have videos of you packaging it up for shipping, or even if the buyer returns the same item you sold them. When a buyer isn’t happy, eBay will bend over backwards to make them happy. If you don’t authorize the return before the deadline, they will refund the buyer without even requiring them to return the item. At this point, if it’s not too late, your best best is to accept the return, send the prepaid label, and hope they send back a board that you can attempt to fix and sell again. Contacting eBay will do nothing, even if their support says they won’t refund the buyer, the support agent is clueless or lying and the refund will still happen. Your only option, if they don’t return the same board you shipped them, would be to sue the buyer in small claims court to attempt to get your money back that way.
That’s what I’ve done is just accepted the return. It’s part of doing business on ebay I suppose. I do wish there were better ways of protecting the seller from buyers that clearly don’t understand what they are doing and then want to play the blame game.
I didn’t clean it real well when I packaged it because the buyer was messaging me asking me to rush the shipment. My best guess is the first thing he did was run a rag across the empty cpu socket.
I looked at his feedback and it’s all positive so I don’t think the guy is scamming but I did record the serial number so I’m curious as to what comes back.
Got it back…it’s got several bent pins and I few I think are meant to be bent that way. I have a video of it but not sure how to upload it to this forum. I will compare with another skylake board and maybe make an attempt to bend them back. None of them look terrible but being so tiny and without the right gear may be difficult to accomplish.
Buyer sent straight a request of money with a DM: “send me half the price I paid or I open up the case on Ebay”.
I replied to go ahead, open up the case and I’ll refund it. A few denied requests later and the return request was open. I had very good pictures of how the package was and the condition of the board before sending, I added the pictures of the conversation. Still Ebay sided with the buyer.
At the end I got lucky, he never sent it back, I guess he didn’t want to pay for the shipment back and he just tried to force a discount on the price. I had to wait 30 days for the payment to arrive and funnily I couldn’t even give a bad review since he opened a refund request. Reporting the user is probably not doing anything but I did it anyway.
Buyer feedback doesn’t matter. eBay got rid of negative feedback awhile ago. Even sellers can scrub negative feedback from their records if they’re Top Rated.
Your best bet is to educate yourself on eBay best practices and insure any packages that you can’t afford to take a loss on. Take many pics to deter disappointed buyers, hope to catch your buyer in a lie, or rely on them to help you with insurance claims.