It seems that when­ever I find some­thing I no longer want or need I turn to eBay to turn it into some quick cash, how­ever I’ve had a few bizarre expe­ri­ences in the past few weeks that has made this rou­tine rather annoy­ing. I think my luck is chang­ing because I did man­age to get a good price on a jer­sey to make good on a bet thanks to a friendly seller.

At the end of August, I posted an old SIMS PC game on eBay that I had found col­lect­ing dust in the base­ment. There was noth­ing wrong with the game besides the fact that I had turned every­one in my fam­ily to Mac or Ubuntu users so no one had Win­dows to run the game. I even­tu­ally found a buyer who won it for next to noth­ing with maybe $9 in ship­ping cost. I walked it down to the UPS store in the Union since our new house is so close and the ship­ping charges were actu­ally more than the item’s sell­ing price and ship­ping cost so I lost money on the deal. That’s not the worst part.

I get an email notice from UPS about a week later say­ing that the pack­age was unde­liv­er­able! I’ve never heard of this and of course the buyer was fill­ing my eBay mes­sage inbox with sob sto­ries about how her daugh­ter was anx­iously await­ing for the game to arrive. I tell her about the unde­liv­er­able notice and she tells me that she wanted me to send it to another address that wasn’t con­firmed or listed as her ship­ping address when she checked out on Pay­Pal. Is that not the sto­ry­book eBay scam? 

I need this item overnighted to Nige­ria for my fam­ily member’s birth­day even though this account is reg­is­tered to Florida

eBay tells you to not ship to non-confirmed loca­tions so I shipped to the address that she had on record think­ing that would cover my ass. The pack­age gets returned to me and then the buyer opens a dis­pute because noth­ing was deliv­ered to her. I explain over and over to Pay­Pal the sit­u­a­tion includ­ing track­ing num­bers and emails from UPS. They even saw that the address she listed when check­ing out was the one I had a track­ing num­ber to! Pay­Pal sided with her for some rea­son and I had to give back the $9 she paid me after already spend­ing $11 on ship­ping the item ini­tially so it was like a $20 loss for me!

The pack­age still sits on my shelf in its pack­ag­ing and I’m about ready to re-list it hop­ing the next buyer gives me a real address to ship to.

The most recent eBay headache came just a week or two ago. I sold an old broad­band modem to a guy in Indi­anapo­lis for a lit­tle under $9 and had a ship­ping charge of $8.99, but he wanted to pick it up from me since my address was listed as Carmel, IN. When I informed him that I was in Bloom­ing­ton for school, he thought I should ship it to him for free. Not so fast Tahar! The price of gas to drive from your west side res­i­dence to Carmel or Bloom­ing­ton is going to be more than the $8.99 in ship­ping. Also, it’s only 20 miles fur­ther to Bloom­ing­ton than to Carmel from where you live and odds are that traf­fic will make the drive longer to Carmel even though it’s closer.

I tried to play nice and offered to bring it up to Indy when I flew out to Vegas at 5am on a Sat­ur­day. He actu­ally wanted to meet me and pick it up at the air­port. Absent minded me for­got it while pack­ing neces­si­ties for my trip, but I emailed him the night before so he didn’t have to show up for noth­ing. This prompted a, “ship it to me for free or I’m open­ing a dis­pute!” So right now it’s a claim and I am going to drag it out as long as pos­si­ble to stick it to this ass­hole who would rather meet a stranger at 5am in the air­port than pay $8.99 to have an eBay item shipped to his front door. Some­thing just isn’t right about that and for the $8.60 I stand to have returned to him, it’s just as much fun to drag out this dis­pute on Pay­Pal. I’ve already relisted the item :)

I have had ONE good eBay expe­ri­ence lately when I was search­ing for a Philadel­phia Phillies home Jimmy Rollins jer­sey that I owed my room­mate due to a lost bet. I thought Manny Ramirez and Joe Torre could take care of the most los­ing fran­chise in all of sports, but that wasn’t the case so I was faced with find­ing a cheap jer­sey quick. I sent a mes­sage to the seller of the cheap­est jer­sey I found ask­ing if he’d be will­ing to sell it to me at a flat price before the auc­tion was over. Now I sound like a scam­mer so to ensure my authen­tic­ity I briefly explained how I was just a col­lege guy try­ing to make good on a lost bet. The guy actu­ally went for it and I sent him the money through Pay­Pal just incase he tried to run away with it. 

Turns out that the jer­sey I wanted had a rip in it so he offered to send a dif­fer­ent Phillies jer­sey that was actu­ally nicer. He sent me the track­ing info and it should be here by the end of the week. That’s how eBay is sup­posed to work! Good peo­ple sell­ing their junk to others.

I don’t know why or how peo­ple have formed these grand expec­ta­tions of other buy­ers and sell­ers like each per­son is an Amazon.com or Zappos.com. They’ve become greedy when it comes to get­ting a deal or sav­ing on ship­ping. Hope­fully I’ve just come across two loons too quickly and there are more peo­ple out there like my jer­sey dealer who’s look­ing to help peo­ple out.