eBay Woes

I’ve never been a big eBay person. I sold a car stereo and speakers on there once a looong time ago but I have never purchased anything before. I don’t know why. I don’t have anything against it, but it’s never really appealed to me either. Probably for the same reasons why I hate garage sales. I don’t consider people’s trash to be my treasure. Anyway, the Mister was trolling eBay for a thing for his motorcycle. He found exactly what he wanted, brand new, and for about $100 less than retail. “Wow!!”, I thought. “Maybe I have underestimated eBay all these years.” Off I went to peruse all the many eBay items. I found a delectable little item that was again, about half price retail and I went for the “Buy Out” option. As soon as I clicked accept, or whatever the final thing is, I notice that my address was wrong. It had my old address instead of my current one. I don’t remember registering for eBay but apparently I had done so at our old house. CRAP!! So I immediately sent a message to the seller asking her to ship my item to my current address and apologized for the confusion. She replied, thanking me for my prompt payment (I did the fast pay with PayPal), and said she would ship it to my current address.

Then, I get another e-mail from her saying that when she was printing my shipping label, she noticed that I have zero feedback (Um yeah. That would be because this is my first eBay purchase) and with my address change request, she didn’t feel safe mailing me my item. So she refunded my payment and asked me to resubmit with the correct address. I’m an eBay noob here, I have no idea how to re-purchase an item on eBay once the auction has already been closed. I explain this to her and tell her that I would be willing just to send her the payment through PayPal using the “goods” option which would totally switch the trust thing since doing it that way would make it easy for her to renege on the transaction. She replied saying that she has over 13,000 positive feedback and that she would never go back on an agreement and that I should correct my address, cancel the refund, and then she would ship my item. Don’t you think that changing my address would be the first thing that I did after my mistake?

I explained to her that I had, in fact, changed my address on eBay but that it had always been correct on PayPal because I use my PayPal account for business purposes and have had a PayPal account since 2000. I also replied and said that there isn’t an option to cancel the refund as far as I can tell and asked her how to do it since she is such an expert on this stuff. I didn’t say the last part but I was thinking it.

She replied and said that she can send the item to whatever address I have on either eBay or PayPal but I had told her they weren’t correct. Didn’t I already explain that they now match??? Didn’t I tell her that the eBay address was incorrect but that I had changed it so that it wouldn’t be?? ARGH!!! And she also said just to send her the money via PayPal. Didn’t I offer to do that like a thousand e-mails ago?!?!?!? 

I am so frustrated at this point that I don’t even want the damn thing anymore but I can’t go back on this because I already agreed to purchase the item. SO, I am going to send her the money using my PayPal account and hope that she sends me my item. Is eBay always like this? I realize that the original problem was my fault but she had my money because she had to freaking REFUND it to me so how was I not going to pay?!?!?! I should have just gone to a ding dang store and paid full price for what I wanted, had it in hand the moment I paid for it, and been happy with it with no worries that the store wouldn’t give it to me after they already had my ding dang money!!!

I won’t say that I will never eBay again. It surely can’t  be as bad as all this or it wouldn’t be as popular as it is. But, I will think long and consider hard before I do. This level of paranoia is hard to handle.