I think at that point, you report them to Ebay for fraud, don't you? Or is that just spitting in the ocean?
Turns out she opened too many cases and they "suspended" her account, which is an eBay euphemism for being banned for life. That means that her account that she'd been using since 2000 was dead and gone forever, and she was no longer welcome on the site.
I agree with other posters. The eBay of old is effectively dead. You are better off buying things from Amazon or Ali Express 99% of the time. The days of great deals on items are pretty much gone. You can still find some rare and unusual stuff that is worth buying, but the dominance of eBay now means that most things are very close to market rate unless (or even if!) they are counterfeit or some other scam. More like a dollar store than an online auction house.
I wouldn't say that. I buy from both, and it's a matter of know what you're getting into.
For example, in eBay, it's much more obvious which the location of the shop is (although, it can be tricked as well). At the same time, the client protection process is somewhat simpler in Amazon.
Were they ever there? Back when I could be bothered regularly dealing with the irritation farm that is eBay I found that buyers tended to pay a little over the odds. Both when I was selling or trying to buy.
There was definitely a time between early eBay hitting a critical mass of sellers and eBay getting saturated with professionals and robots, when the deals COULD BE incredible. You still needed to suss them out, but they were a regular occurrence
In my case, they sent a warning saying I would not be able to contest any more purchases for some period of time and that my account was at risk of being suspended.
I try to avoid eBay as much as possible now. When their response to rampant fraud is "we're gonna suspend your account if you point it out again," it's time to move on. The only people left there seem to be scammers who know how to navigate the system.
AliExpress is usually cheaper for the China-direct items anyway, and those seem to comprise most of the listings on eBay nowadays.
One case was a fake flash key, another a scammer trying to "buy" my laptop with fake bank transfer receipts, and the last one a genuine SD card, but destined to the chinese market.
In all cases Ebay didn't care much; in the first, I even lost my money.
Nowadays, when something similar happens, I just report the item as not arrived; although this is not 100% ethical, for clients it's sadly the safest way.
This is in reality part of a much larger issue, where the portals profit from being more lenient, so that they have a larger amount of sellers (and sales) of cheap crap, rather than being more punishing, and losing sales.
I definitely advise to report items as not arrived, rather than risking through reporting frauds.
OTOH being more punishing also incentivizes false reporting by competitors, which isn't at all rare.
Anyone who wants an easy startup: it's literally impossible to find high-quality aftermarket laptop batteries, the market is swamped with shitty Chinese knockoffs that die in a couple months (or sooner). The battery cells themselves are usually the part that dies, it's pretty straightforward to refurbish the battery by replacing the cells. But right now there is just no place to buy decent-quality replacement packs, it's OEM direct from the supplier or cheap chinese junk, nothing in between.
I have no idea why SterlingTek or Wasabi Power or some of the other companies that fill this niche for camera batteries haven't jumped into these other markets, but they haven't, and the niche remains unfilled.
The most recent was an extended battery for a 2012(?) Acer Chromebook, which cost about $12.
I would imagine part of the reason why large brands don't jump on this market is that there are so many models, so you might not be producing 10k+ of each model. Given everything apart from the plastic case is standard (or at least applies to a wide range of models) it's economical to produce these on a smaller scale than is usual for large brands.
eBay guidelines are not to return counterfeit items, and there's a good chance the seller will be buying in bulk anyway.
Maybe they were printed in the same Fab and a whole batch of these got mislabeled? Maybe someone intentionally relabeled them years ago back when they were worth more?
Essentially, I'd agree only if it could be proven that they knew the goods were shady but had a "don't ask, don't tell" policy and only used the ignorance as a shield to give them plausible deniability.
Claiming that it was "damaged in shipping" is the shadiest part of the whole deal. It pretty much guarantees the intentional fraud of the seller.
Have you ever seen the show "Storage Wars"? It's really dumb, but basically people go bid on abandoned storage lockers. I assume everything on that show gets sold on eBay. The people on the show are not exactly the best and brightest...
I have four (4!) copies of a Raymond Chandler paperback; a major online retailer named after a ditto river had it listed as a hardcover edition; I receive my first paperback, get in touch stating I ordered a hardcover, got a paperback, please advise. They told me to keep the defective item, new being shipped immediately, very sorry &c.
2nd paperback arrive, I tell them again that what I ordered was a hardcover; very sorry, keep it, correct item coming soon.
3rd paperback arrive; I beg them to just check their inventory; book must have been wrongly classified. "Very sorry. Keep it, we'll send you a new one." I gave up.
4th book arrived. Anyone interested in a nice copy of "Killer in the rain"? Two copies? Pleeease?
I don't want to pay $30+ on shipping to return an item that was incorrectly sent to me.
I'm assuming you are talking about Amazon, but this phrase caught my eye, and a quick net search turned up nothing: what on earth is a "ditto river"?
ditto can be used as a noun (meaning the same again, e.g. in a list when you don't want to repeat something in the row below) or an adverb (as it is here, meaning likewise).
Even if the buyer doesn't scam me, by the time I've paid eBay fees and PayPal fees and postage, it's eaten into the small value fairly substantially.
I wouldn't be surprised if that's what some of the fake carts are. I ordered an X-in-1 card for DS recently (haven't seen one since the OG GameBoy days and was curious), and it was just a generic DS flashcart with a QA sticker covering the SD slot. Same seller was selling a bunch of single DS games without box and suspiciously cheap, so I wouldn't be surprised if they were essentially the same thing.