Complaint Review: ebay

Because of ebay’s flawed shipping calculator, I lost money on a transaction.  Be extremely careful any time you use this service, because ebay strongly favors the needs of buyers over sellers.  In effect, the company rips off sellers to attract more buyers.

A few weeks ago, I decided to sell a gently used telescope, put it up for auction on ebay at the site’s suggestion, and trusted ebay’s shipping cost calculator to give me an accurate reading.  It said shipping would be $12.80.

A guy from Florida with a Hispanic name bought the telescope for the minimum possible bid of $22.50.  I went ahead and paid for the shipping through ebay because the site gave a small discount through the U.S. Postal Service.  But when I took it to the post office, it wound up costing $19.10 more than the calculator had said.  Since I had already paid for the partial shipping and didn’t want to get a bad rating from the buyer, I went ahead and shipped the telescope.

Ebay and Paypal suggested I invoice the buyer for the extra shipping, so I did.  But the buyer sent a cryptic message back in Spanish refusing to pay anything further.

I called ebay customer service, and a representative said the company might be able to help me if the buyer didn’t come through.  But when I called back again, all ebay would do for me was refund my $3.50 administrative fee.  When I asked if I could give the buyer a negative rating, I was told that I would not be allowed to do so because it would scare him away from purchasing through ebay again.  In fact, the ebay system does not allow a seller to give anything but positive feedback.  I find it particularly unfair that the system favors the buyer’s interests over the seller’s, especially when the buyer received such an extreme bargain.

I then contacted Devin Wenig, CEO of ebay, who you would think would want to treat customers fairly.  Rather than helping, he assigned my case to an underling, who sent me mock sympathetic emails that blamed the problem on me and accused me of being confused and frustrated. But there is no confusion nor frustration.  I am simply unhappy that (1) ebay screwed me on a transaction and (2) won’t do the right thing to fix it – or even to meet me halfway.

Because I got shafted on this deal, I intend to never use ebay again. This buyer got a garage sale price for my telescope in exchange for virtually nothing for my trouble.  I would have been better off donating the telescope to Goodwill and claiming it on my taxes.