Far East sellers

soolin

I know many sellers are unhappy about Far East sellers on ebay and that there are a myriad conspiracy theory about them having more lenient rules- but are they actually subject to the exact same rules that we UK sellers are- assuming they have listed on ebay.uk?

I ask because I buy a lot of small items from The far East, mainly on behalf of a small local club and usually once you get past a month or so and have exceeded ebay delivery estimates and item hasn't arrived they will refund you with apologies. I now have 3 sellers both at the limit of the ebay estimates for delivery which was around 35 - 38 days and emailed to say my items hadn't arrived, and the sellers seem very blase. I don't want to open cases, I have had to open one already in the past few weeks, but these sellers both tell me that they will not refund until after 56 days from despatch. Obviously I am not leaving it that long, I am happy to go a day or two over the delivery estimate but I am not going to run out of time for an ebay case.

I have tried explaining that these items are now late, according to ebay and that i think 56 days is unreasonable- but they just insist they cannot refund until 56 days have passed.

The three sellers BTW respond with exactly the same email (the last one actually says 'insert name here) and appear to be the same person. All have exceptionally high feedback scores, between 4000 - 11,000 and show at over 98.5 % (one is 99.4%)

Perhaps their volume is such that they can take these defects with no impact on their accounts at all?

RFW

I don't know about defect rules, etc. This time last year I had been buying products from China that were from a few sellers but essentially from the same factory. Another seller came along with much the same products and appeared to be clearing some out by auction, I bought a fair amount of stuff and had some correspondence to wait, there should have been about 5 separate parcels. I put claims in after about two weeks, it turned out the seller hadn't sent anything out to me or other buyers, I got all the money back. I did wonder if this was the same seller as the other accounts.

The Chinese sellers I've seen seem to use at least 10 accounts, using different names, either company or staff. They tend to have 2-3 main ones that if they get too many defects on they slow down and leave inactive for a bit and then bring up one of the others. They also use the smaller accounts and keep a few items listed. Every so often they start new accounts that tend to get lower prices. On the latter I've picked up some genuine bargains as other buyers are obviously worried about a high volume new seller.

My guess would be that they don't really care if an account gets suspended as they have plenty of others and lots of names to keep going.

In other news Amazon appears to have ended a lot of low price Far East sellers with their minimum fee. There's still a few sellers selling 40p inc postage items, which means they're sending the item for absolutely nothing.

Brooker_Dave

RFW wrote: »

In other news Amazon appears to have ended a lot of low price Far East sellers with their minimum fee. There's still a few sellers selling 40p inc postage items, which means they're sending the item for absolutely nothing.

Isn't airmail from China virtually free?

People flogging cheepo Chinese tat on ebay must have been pretty well priced out by the Chinese flogging it direct?

RFW

Brooker_Dave wrote: »

Isn't airmail from China virtually free?

People flogging cheepo Chinese tat on ebay must have been pretty well priced out by the Chinese flogging it direct?

It looks as though you can send a parcel from China to the UK for less than the price of posting the same parcel within the UK. No idea how this works given that the Royal Mail do at least the same amount of work when it gets to the UK. My guess would be that international postage rules/payments have not been updated for years.

That's not that relevant though as I was referring to Chinese sellers with items at 40p who get charged 40p for selling it now. Even if the item, postage and envelope costs them nothing they're still losing money. It will probably filter through to some of them eventually and they'll pile on more tat back on Ebay.

PenguinJim

soolin wrote: »

I don't want to open cases, I have had to open one already in the past few weeks, but these sellers both tell me that they will not refund until after 56 days from despatch. Obviously I am not leaving it that long, I am happy to go a day or two over the delivery estimate but I am not going to run out of time for an ebay case.

If you paid by Paypal and have a UK account, they changed the time limit on opening a case to 180 days.

(If you missed Paypal's email about the update as well as the MSE threads that mentioned this, you can still see it in your Paypal account. Click on the specific transaction in your Paypal account and it will tell you that you can open a dispute in the Resolution Centre within 180 days.)

Although personally, I'm always happy to give sellers at least a week after the estimated delivery date. If they have estimated 35-38 days, and one waits a further week after that, it's even still inside Paypal's old 45-day limit.

[Deleted User]

Most of these chinese sellers actually ship a pallet worth of stuff to some chinese takeaway back room somewhere in the UK and dispatch from there. While taking the money and doing the admin from China.

Brooker_Dave

Deleted_User wrote: »

Most of these chinese sellers actually ship a pallet worth of stuff to some chinese takeaway back room somewhere in the UK and dispatch from there. While taking the money and doing the admin from China.

All the stuff I've bought on ebay/amazon/aliexpress has all come direct from China/HK?

RFW

Brooker_Dave wrote: »

All the stuff I've bought on ebay/amazon/aliexpress has all come direct from China/HK?

Me too. To send it to the UK and post again from there would be more expensive.

soolin

PenguinJim wrote: »

If you paid by Paypal and have a UK account, they changed the time limit on opening a case to 180 days.

(If you missed Paypal's email about the update as well as the MSE threads that mentioned this, you can still see it in your Paypal account. Click on the specific transaction in your Paypal account and it will tell you that you can open a dispute in the Resolution Centre within 180 days.)

Although personally, I'm always happy to give sellers at least a week after the estimated delivery date. If they have estimated 35-38 days, and one waits a further week after that, it's even still inside Paypal's old 45-day limit.

I realise that paypal have extended their claim period, but for these small items I want to ensure I claim via ebay for convenience. On some days I can buy a dozen or more items, all around the same price and trying to find the item exactly in my very busy paypal account would be time consuming as I would have to open each transaction individually to find it as I do not read the Chinese characters . Whether it is a glitch or not, I cannot show purchases more than about 40 days ago in my ebay- it allows me to select the whole of 2014, but only shows selected items (I have no idea why).

Brooker_Dave wrote: »

All the stuff I've bought on ebay/amazon/aliexpress has all come direct from China/HK?

Same here, these are all very small purchases, and even one I made for some simple stickers that the club wanted and cost something like 41p came from China in their own envelope.

[Deleted User]

I'm not saying all do, but it has been known for some chinese power sellers to ship pallets worth of stock over to a mate in the UK to post out as and when instructed to by the said ebay seller.

the_lunatic_is_in_my_head

soolin wrote: »

I am happy to go a day or two over the delivery estimate but I am not going to run out of time for an ebay case.

You have 30 days from the last ETA date to open an eBay case, you can still open one after this timeframe but you can't escalated it to eBay.