And if there was no fraud you can simple get extra income. Just tell that you received brick instead of laptop or digital movie and the money will be taken from seller and returned. Just you can not repeat it too often with same credit card but you can have many from different companies... There is NO SELLER PROTECTION on ebay because by credit card purchase you can do something but by paypal never - the buyer is always winning because they are afraid of credit company action.
The whole e-Bay feedback system is a joke. I buy and sell coins on E-Bay . I notified E-bay on some sellers that were selling scam slabbed coins. Anyone who knows anything about grading coins would be able to spot that the coins were improperly graded. But a novice would not have a clue. What did E-Bay do ?? They sent me a link to the guidelines for selling coins. Totally useless response.
In a similar boat i buy and sell modern comics on ebay all the time...one of the biggest problems with that is obvious over-grading by sellers. Sure you can ask for additional scans and an experienced buyer will soon become aware of certain sellers that purposely over grade hiding behind phrases like "we're not professional graders". A lot of buyers will have a legitimate complaint about the item when it arrives but will not leave neutral/negative feedback simply because that slimy seller will quickly retaliate with a negative. I suspect a lot of these sellers feedbacks will drop from 98/99 to 90/95 or something closer to what it should be.
I am sure their are people on ebay who are selling things non-legit. But saying that because items are 40-60% off they are stolen is very narrow minded and short sighted. The problem is that major retailers have been screwing the customer for years with incredible markups. With e-bay you have an economic system where consumers have access to 100% information online. 2nd there are plenty of reasons why items are discounted significantly. Discontinued Refurbished Odd Lot Excess inventory Inventory closeout As an e-bay Gold Power Seller who has been able to strike legitimate deals with wholesalers to offer the kind of prices that you balk at I speak from experience. This sounds like the same group of people who thought google would never make money "giving away services and software for free". It's impossible. The only impossibilities are the ones that we create between our ears.
I'll grant you that international dealings with eBay is a whole different ballgame. I've neither bought nor sold to even Canada, and would not consider buying or selling anywhere else. Further, I have no insight into the nonUS eBay, I know they are worldwide, and I would expect (but do not know) that the fraud outside the US is even worse than it is inside the US. I suppose if you are outside the US, then selling to the US might be your lowest risk option. But it clearly has more risk than a US seller and a US buyer - so it's not surprising that you encounter more problems. What are you going to do, fly to the US so you can beat up some teenybopper over a Britney Spears video that she didn't like? But the majority of eBay is still intraUS. And the bulk of that fraud is seller based, while the bulk of buyer fraud is easy (for US folks) to protect against.
I buy little things ($30 or less) a few times a year from Ebay. I would never buy something expensive because (1) the feedback system is a joke as others have pointed out, and (2) a lot of these stores will describe an item as New but when you read the fine print it's actually refurb'd. It's totally misleading. When I report them to Ebay, they do nothing about it. I guess those powersellers bring in so much fees , they won't do anything about it. Oh yeah, a lot of stuff there is stolen or counterfeit. Ebay = Buyer-beware.
This guy seems to be very honest, he has 174 positives. http://feedback.ebay.com/ws/eBayISA...sales&ftab=AllFeedback&sspagename=STRK:ME:UFS
Oh please, the buyers are just as slimy and likely to leave negative feedback To put all the power in their hands is just suicide
Incorrect. I do not have exact statistic now but I found information about 5 year ago when they wrote that USA is one side of transaction in 60%/. Now I strongly believe it is less. If you consider US transaction when shipping is inside USA /so not USA-another country or another country USA/ than I am 100% sure that these transactions are less than half of total ebay volume. Do not forget about ebay UK, Canada, China, Germany, Holland, Poland etc. For your information I am large seller and what I am selling is hard to find in USA and it is collectible /or for price as minimum 2x higher even consider shipping/. I have about 36% export to USA what is about 3% more than to European union as total /long term, during last months EU is more than USA/. Japan is bigger than any EU country but still only 16%. Btw, shipping to China is rising a lot, from few packets 5 year ago now it is about 8%
If you are not selling anything why would you care if your feedback is bad? Just rate the seller at what they did and do not worry about their negative feedback. You can always create another account just for buying. And keep the one with good feedback for selling.