Thrice-told tales: eBay’s New Resolution Process or Hassle-Free Easy Money for Buyers

Written by Cliff Comments
Last Updated September 29, 2009

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By Cliff Aliperti

Within the past 24 hours I wrote:

I just can’t help having a nagging feeling that I got my money back all too easily."

And Recycled Thoughts from a Retro Gamer wrote:

This frightens me more than any other potential eBay selling pitfall.

While a day or two earlier Chef Ralph wrote:

E-Bay I see why you are a success. this type of service is far and few between…Thank you

Chef Ralph was a buyer, Retro Gamer wrote about a seller, and I’m primarily a seller who in this case was a buyer. Three different perspectives on the same policy, eBay’s new Resolution process.

The buyer, Chef Ralph, had the same experience I had as a buyer wherein contact with the seller was lost and "A week later E-Bay sent a follow up, and If you clicked ‘Still no resolution’, it gave you a phone number to call." You can see the details of his transaction inside his post, but the heart of the matter for us is that Chef Ralph presents himself as a long time eBayer, but one who just buys and sells a little bit here and there. He admitted to seeing some red flags along the way, but he trusted eBay and PayPal’s claims along the way and in the end that trust was verified to him by them righting his wrong and refunding his money.

Our friend Dan, perhaps better known by you as @magisterrex on Twitter, tells a different tale on his Retro Gamer site. First this was an older transaction, one handled under the old system in which a sometimes seller sold goods to a pro who resells goods from his own eBay account. In this story the buyer claimed items were not as described, and despite photos proving otherwise PayPal took his side and not only debited the seller’s account $770.10 to refund the buyer, but let the buyer keep the goods!

My perspective fell somewhere in between. I’m quite active as a buyer and a seller with multiple eBay accounts having 5 and 4-digit figure feedback counts. I know what I’m doing as a buyer and I have a pretty keen sensitivity towards sellers as in the past 10 years I’ve likely encountered most of their problems.

My story centered around about 50 bucks involved in an international transaction ended back in June, but which fell under the new resolution process by the time I took action. I had the same experience as Chef Ralph: I called the number when prompted, had about a 6 or 7 minute conversation in my case, though that was largely me extending the process, was told I’d have a refund and my money was back in my PayPal account in 24 hours.

Now I’ve pasted the exact nuts and bolts of the process below, or you can read my entire story about the transaction in my original post on The Collectors Site, but I’d like to dwell for a moment on these different perspectives and how this process is going to effect us, and eBay, going forward.

First, the cynics among us my disqualify the story from Retro Gamer because it fell under the old process. But the point is, the new process is a lot easier for buyers to get their money back. This leads us back to Chef Ralph’s post where a satisfied buyer goes so far as to pat eBay on the back and thank them–this, as we know, is exactly what eBay wants, happy buyers.

I want happy buyers too, but has the scale slid too far over? Has eBay guaranteed not only happy buyers but damn happy scammers as well?

If eBay assumed the risk on the two more current transactions–and by "assumed the risk" I mean paid the buyers back out of their own pockets and not the seller’s–then that’s great. That’s how they should be involved with transactions occurring on their own platform. But the question remains, what happens to the seller? I honestly lack the stones to write my seller and find out what, if anything, happened during the process to him (though if it went the way of the rest of the transaction he’d likely ignore my email anyway). As you’ll see below in my conversation with the eBay customer service rep, what happens on the other side of the transaction, the seller’s side, was made very unclear.

From that conversation it’s very clear that sellers can’t have too many of these strikes against their record and remain on the site, but it’s a mystery as to how many is too many. It is easy to see though that once word gets out too many is going to come all too fast. Is eBay willing to bend or revise their process not if, but when this proves true?

Awhile back John Lawson, owner of this colderICE blog, had mentioned (somewhere) the idea of the pre-approved buyer. That may actually be what’s necessary under this system, but seller–and eBay–trust me, we don’t want this. In this day and age we should be finding ways to lower barriers to purchase, not erecting new barriers, but this policy makes that impossible. (Though one simple suggestion along this line would be to force buyers to have their registered names and addresses be their actual names and addresses, a problem I ran into myself recently).

The threat to eBay itself here is that it becomes some kind of online 5-and-dime, where sellers of high ticket items disappear and sellers of lower value items like myself put a cap on purchases to avoid sending too much to one buyer. A fear of selling too much? How counter-intuitive is that?

Update #1: Potentially good news over on Retro Gamer, eBay’s Griff has stepped in with a comment and request for more information. eBay might fix this one!

Update #2: Between the time of my first and final drafts Chris Dawson of Tamebay has posted on this topic as well, a great read, especially for the eBay.uk perspective.

Through an excerpt of my original post on The Collectors Site, here’s the process:

Here are all of the questions on the new Resolution Request form:

Did you not receive the item or is there a problem with it?

Do you have the package tracking number?

Have you tried contacting the seller?

How did you contact the seller?

Did the seller respond?

Is the seller willing to resolve the issue or did they give you options? (enter details in next question)

Tell us what happened in your communication with the seller. Please be as detailed as possible since we will use this information to resolve your case.

How can eBay help you?

After submitting I was informed that they’d copy the seller on the request and work with me to get me my item or my money back.

eBay sent 2 follow-up emails asking how it was going. The second such email had a couple of big buttons asking whether or not things had been worked out. I clicked no, and was sent to a page showing this:

ebay dispute phone Thrice told tales: eBays New Resolution Process or Hassle Free Easy Money for Buyers

What the hell I figured, I called and was connected pretty quickly (under 5 minutes) to a very polite and well-spoken gentleman who asked for my eBay ID, the transaction number and some personal information. He asked if I’d paid through PayPal, which I did. He asked for my story, and I gave him the nuts and bolts of the above, to which he replied, “Oh, you’ve waited more than enough time, you should have your item,” and then something to the effect of “let’s get to work on getting your money back.”

Explaining the situation in further detail I told him that I still preferred the item to the refund and noting the seller’s high feedback number I explained that I really didn’t think he’d set out to rip me off, I just hadn’t received anything for my money yet. The customer service rep repeated that I’d waited long enough and asked for some info on my PayPal account.

We got right to the point of the refund when I interrupted: “Just a second. Again, I think this is a good seller on the whole, I’ve just had a bad experience. My doing this isn’t going to get him kicked off eBay or anything, is it?” The rep told me probably not. I explained that I was a seller myself and so I had some empathy in this situation. So I pushed a little more and asked, “It takes more than one of these to get you tossed off the site, doesn’t it?” He hemmed and hawed some giving me the general impression that while he either didn’t know for sure or wasn’t at liberty to say chances were that it’d take more than one of these black marks to ban the seller.

I had more questions, but honestly I felt A) I wasn’t going to receive this item and B) the seller dropped the ball not replying to my later email request, so rather than press forward with more and somehow talk myself out of this refund I gave permission for the rep to proceed. He told me it would take something like 5-7 business days for payment to arrive, but actually the money was in my PayPal account by the next morning.