Items not as described - Ebay tell you to pay to send back!

Strapped

Ring eBay and complain until they give you the return postage costs.

techspec

Strapped wrote: »

Ring eBay and complain until they give you the return postage costs.

^^^^^^^ They already have - see post above yours ^^^^^^^^

RFW

[quote=[Deleted User];57681019]Yep. I did. I kicked up a fuss to ebay about it and now ebay have refunded me the total cost inc postage so I dont even have to send it back!

Not the point though. Seller has now got away with it and ebay have only coughed up because I kicked up a fuss....[/QUOTE]
A good result and no way of knowing if the money you received was from the seller and if they had a strike (or similar) against them.

There is the other side that Ebay can't know about, if we had a seller on here claiming the buyer had the right item and in good order but they had made something up so they didn't have to pay any return postage, the sellers here would be irked.

That said I do agree that Ebay should be doing something about this, Amazon's system is a bit better and more likely to get the seller to pay return postage or just refund before return.

[Deleted User]

RFW wrote: »

A good result and no way of knowing if the money you received was from the seller and if they had a strike (or similar) against them.

There is the other side that Ebay can't know about, if we had a seller on here claiming the buyer had the right item and in good order but they had made something up so they didn't have to pay any return postage, the sellers here would be irked.

That said I do agree that Ebay should be doing something about this, Amazon's system is a bit better and more likely to get the seller to pay return postage or just refund before return.

Yes. I can see the point. If buyer has changed their mind then they should pay to return....

But at the moment, its biased towards the seller.

shaun_from_Africa

RFW wrote: »

A good result and no way of knowing if the money you received was from the seller and if they had a strike (or similar) against them.

It certainly sounds as if the money came from ebay themselves (what they call a "no fault refund"). If the money was from the seller, the OP wouldn't have received this before they were able to prove that they had sent the item back where as no fault refunds are paid out without the goods being returned.

[Deleted User]

Yep. It was from ebay.

Looks like what happens is that ebay know their wrong maybe and that they cant expect a buyer to pay for return postage. So if you kick up a fuss they refund you to save themselves the hassle...

Make me wonder where you stand legally with this? After all if you bought something online from, say amazon, and it turned out to misdecribed surely legally you wouldnt have to pay to return it?

Crowqueen

Legally, you have mechanisms to reclaim postage - the small claims court or a letter before action quoting the appropriate guidelines or law. For really egregious situations you can go to the CAB and get Trading Standards to sort the seller out. They can't actually get you the money even then - they would make an order to pay but the seller doesn't have to cough up.

eBay are not a law enforcement agency so can't make their sellers refund postage if they have no mechanism themselves to do so. I agree they should find one, but they would probably use pre-printed labels to do it, and bill the seller for those, rather than take it upon themselves to give actual payouts to buyers to use bought postage. They are doing this in the US but their laws are different so it is a voluntary thing on the seller's part. Enforcing it is a large part of the battle in the UK where there is no statutory authority to make someone pay what could be a completely random amount.

Amazon use preprinted labels and/or Yodel to collect returns. For their marketplace sellers I don't know what they do as have never been through that either as a seller or buyer there. However, you are dealing with a big company that values its customers and has huge purchasing power with Yodel in order to be able to provide free returns at a cost-effective price. eBay sellers are not part of 'the mothership' and not directly controlled by it (one of the reason its seller metric system is so harsh) the mothership cannot do similar to enforce the law.

I sincerely hope they start offering postal labels as a matter of routine, and bill a seller as part of a dispute, but it would take a lot of working out what was an equitable system (so buyers didn't start more disputes in order to get postage paid where they weren't necessarily entitled to it by law) and so they are understandably hesitant to launch something more than the very loose piecemeal system they have already where they only pay postage costs when a seller does not respond to a dispute and pay out when they can see the item has been put through the postal system.