Ebay completely circular so-called ‘help’ system - money back guarantee impossible to invoke!

sleekitwan

Try and make this compact, we all have better stuff to be doing at Christmas..
Bought a 4Tb SSD - this is a portable hard drive storage device, of the non-spinning-disk type, ie just memory chips like a USB thumb drive is.  I didn’t buy one with outrageous promises - there are some at double the capacity offered at half the price.  It even had a ‘name’ on it - ‘swordfish’ it said.

These devices use a USB-C cable, like the newer iphones etc.  They are the thickness of a cigarette box, but half the thickness, usually bright red or blue in colour.  The faster the memory chips inside are, and the bigger the capcity (4Tb I chose is more than my PC has), the more expensive they are.

The speed is made up of two possible things - the USB or electronic communications speed (1.1 is really old and slow, from 1998, USB2 is pretty ordinary but ok and USB3 is blistering fast), and the memory chip write and read speeds, which I am just going to say if you see 20 to 40megabits per second (Mb/s) steer clear, it’s slow, USB1.1 slow.  This one, said 430Mb/s so that’s around what USB2 can handle - and twice as fast as my iPad Pro 2 can output at, so that’s all fine.

Anyway, got it arrived in post a few days ago - let it warm up, I used to work in IT.  Then just tried a test file being transferred - I have big files, usually a Gb in size.  About half a Movie in HD say, but they are music files.  The test transfer took ages and ages!  Long story short, I eventually ended up doing actual tests for goodness sake…

My accurate tests showed, the Solid State Drive (SSD or memory chip storage) was running at the extremely slow pace of write speed of about USB1.1 - 15Megabits per second, to be precise.  A 1998 standard remember!  We only used it for printers and mice and keyboards, and it was not great in those days.  It’s only because it got faster we use it for file storage.

So this is incredibly slow - useless - and would take me 14 hours I told the seller, to transfer say 100Gb of music files.  I wouldn’t even use it if it were free, that’s how bad it is.  A ‘proper’ USB3 SSD would take about 5 hours maximum, maybe as little as 3 hours to do the same job.  Obviously, in either case I wouldn’t stand there over it, it happens overnight, but I will occasionally come back to this ‘archive’ and want to pull a file off it live, and do something to modify it perhaps.  So speed is not entirely irrelevant.

So that is the bad sell I suffered, leading me to ask the seller for a refund.  They just replied saying something about getting some tester person to look at it and that they were not responsible for the printed labelling etc that the item came in?!

I ignored that last part.  I asked for a refund again and laid out my extensive lap-timed testing, and I compared the performance with good Sandisk SD cards I had that were 30mb/s and 130mb/s.  IE the first is down around USB1.1 speed and the latter is towards USB2 speeds.  Remember, this item was sold as USB 3.1  !  But the tests of course, showed it was way way down on that, at a 1998 standard of USB1.1 as I said.

So, fast-forward to today I try to pursue ebay’s system to invoke a money back guarantee they have.  The system seems to force the user to go through a RETURN charade, but this seller does not allow returns on this particular item, an SSD.  So after filling in some details, the reason for the return, the ebay system just blocks you from hitting the ‘confirm’ button, or adding in photos.  Fine, so that doesn’t work.

Then I try getting to ebay money-back through any other help or forum area I can - and each time, ebay step by step, gets me back to the ‘purchases’ part of my buyer profile, then I am made sometimes to go directly into the purchased item of the SSD itself, which of course, is only possible to take to one of FOUR actions, I realise in the end, and one of them is ‘contact the seller’ and one is ‘ask for a refund’ and so on.  Nothing interesting, or that works!

Then I am perplexed.  I try to find another angle to get into the ebay ‘help’ or ‘contact us’ and there’s actually NO WAY to get to their people, at all.

I would literally have to lie and try all sorts of other options to get any response!  Even then, everything comes back to the item purchased, and ebay have got that pegged down.

Thre is one other bugbear in the whole rigmarole - that is that there are only certain items eligible for ebay money-back guarantee!  Not that you can find this when you buy something - there is not even so much as an asterisk against the item, to advise you of it’s lowly, unprotected status.

I don’t know if this is one of those items or not.  

So I sit and ponder where this all leaves me - ebay have locked themselves out of helping me.  There is no earthly way to get a hold of ebay, with anything to do with this item.  A bogus, completely wrong item, misdescribed, and with a bluffing seller, who must know full well what they’ve done.  they are not worried or remorseful in the slightest.  An item of storage media, totally without use to me, and overpriced for what it is.  They couldn’t sell this, I think it’s a faulty pile of USB2 SSDs from some factory bin in Shenzhen.

Ebay don’t care, they have their cut.  The seller does not care, they have my money.  I paid direct using ebay’s direct payment they urged people to go onto, and so have not paypal protection.  I am £34.99 out of pocket, and basically am left trying to bluff the Chinese vendor, that ebay give a darn, and I will report him if he does not pay up!  Wing and prayer.  Pass feathers and Bible thanks.

If this seller, toughs it out, I don’t see how I fight it.  

Now somebody reading this might say ‘well, dealing with a chinese seller…’.  To which I would say, really, we can’t do that?  It’s utterly normal, a global ebay marketplace.  Plus, and this is pretty important, I only searched for UK vendors.

The location is given as somewhere in the UK.  But, when you get the business seller registered address, it’s a Shenzhen one (I looked once it was trouble).

The seller has a 100% record too.  You will understand how this can be - people are basically at the seller’s mercy for a refund.  In some way, the seller must convey they won’t refund unless you leave no rating or a 100% rating?  Anyway, I left a one-star rating and said it was thoroughly misdescribed, and why.  That the seller was selling fake USB drives.  That oughtta nail that down - and of course, all the good it will do me.

But, I gave the vendor several days, I did a load of testing.  I asked for a refund, they did not give one.  Now I find, I am on my own, and that made me think of something…that this vendor knows every possible angle, knows that if they sell low-value items of a certain type to us, there is no comeback on ebay, and it is almost impossible for us to get ebay to do anything, in certain categories of goods.  Or someone is advising the seller, of all this.

In other words, given that this seller sells ONLY luminous signs, apart from this sudden excursion into SSD portable drives, I think we can surmise, someone goes around Shenzhen promulgating this sales scam they have, and tells these vendors, how little comeback there is and that they will manage to offload this garbage essentially, and get away, ‘Shenzhen free’.

I am open to ideas.  I have to wait and see if the seller minds the bad feedback and tries to save it by refunding pronto.  I can send them another message, but the fact ebay have me on a loop, means they’ve pretty much cut me loose.  Incidentally, I also sell stuff on ebay and have several hundred sales and a 100% record over the last 15 years.  In other words, a lot of child’s toys no longer used, and a few vintage instruments (Fender bass, Roland Synthesiser).  I am not a reseller, is what I am saying.

Good luck everyone, keep safe, and I am on the look out now for a much more expensive old-school spinning-disk storage drive!  I have a couple already but they are full and only 1Tb in size, which is like kids’ stuff now for what I need backing-up.

theonlywayisup

Long post (and I too have better things to do at Christmas).

When did you buy it?  Does the seller accept change of mind returns (as it sounds like it isn't faulty) or are you saying it doesn't do what it is advertised as doing (ie, it is SNAD?)

mikb

On the return-item page, "Confirm" button doing nothing is a recent innovation as eBay have "improved" parts of their site. Try a newer browser, as a few things have stopped working in older browsers -- it's patchy. As a seller, things like "View Order Details" works, but further clicking on "Printable View" doesn't.

Your item seems as "SNAD" -- at the speeds you are talking it does sound like USB 1 technology, but did anyone EVER make a 4TB SSD with a USB 1 interface? Seems out of alignment. Are you sure that your computer, or a USB hub, isn't negotiating down the lowest compatible speed that both devices support? Some USB-3 hubs are dumb, in that they slow ALL ports down to USB 2/1 when such a device is plugged in. Others allow mix and match. Does your computer allow you to find out what devices are plugged in, and what speed has been negotiated?

To get to eBay *people* not their circular redirect system, you can request that eBay phone YOU, but it's always a faff finding the link because they PREFER you either look at the FAQs "Did this answer your question?", or resolve it with the seller, or go to your Seller Hub and twiddle your thumbs for a bit ....

powerful_Rogue

Sorry, gave up reading as there was far to much waffle.

Got a (much) shorter version?

born_again

So have you tried another drive to ensure the issue is not your PC or the cable? A slow old hard drive will limit the transfer speed to it's limit. No matter what. Everything defaults to the slowest part of your PC.

USB-C has a default protocol is USB 3.1 which can transfer data up to a blazing 10 Gbps.

Jumblebumble

sleekitwan said:

Try and make this compact, we all have better stuff to be doing at Christmas..
Bought a 4Tb SSD - this is a portable hard drive storage device, of the non-spinning-disk type, ie just memory chips like a USB thumb drive is.  I didn’t buy one with outrageous promises - there are some at double the capacity offered at half the price.  It even had a ‘name’ on it - ‘swordfish’ it said.

These devices use a USB-C cable, like the newer iphones etc.  They are the thickness of a cigarette box, but half the thickness, usually bright red or blue in colour.  The faster the memory chips inside are, and the bigger the capcity (4Tb I chose is more than my PC has), the more expensive they are.

The speed is made up of two possible things - the USB or electronic communications speed (1.1 is really old and slow, from 1998, USB2 is pretty ordinary but ok and USB3 is blistering fast), and the memory chip write and read speeds, which I am just going to say if you see 20 to 40megabits per second (Mb/s) steer clear, it’s slow, USB1.1 slow.  This one, said 430Mb/s so that’s around what USB2 can handle - and twice as fast as my iPad Pro 2 can output at, so that’s all fine.

Anyway, got it arrived in post a few days ago - let it warm up, I used to work in IT.  Then just tried a test file being transferred - I have big files, usually a Gb in size.  About half a Movie in HD say, but they are music files.  The test transfer took ages and ages!  Long story short, I eventually ended up doing actual tests for goodness sake…

My accurate tests showed, the Solid State Drive (SSD or memory chip storage) was running at the extremely slow pace of write speed of about USB1.1 - 15Megabits per second, to be precise.  A 1998 standard remember!  We only used it for printers and mice and keyboards, and it was not great in those days.  It’s only because it got faster we use it for file storage.

So this is incredibly slow - useless - and would take me 14 hours I told the seller, to transfer say 100Gb of music files.  I wouldn’t even use it if it were free, that’s how bad it is.  A ‘proper’ USB3 SSD would take about 5 hours maximum, maybe as little as 3 hours to do the same job.  Obviously, in either case I wouldn’t stand there over it, it happens overnight, but I will occasionally come back to this ‘archive’ and want to pull a file off it live, and do something to modify it perhaps.  So speed is not entirely irrelevant.

So that is the bad sell I suffered, leading me to ask the seller for a refund.  They just replied saying something about getting some tester person to look at it and that they were not responsible for the printed labelling etc that the item came in?!

I ignored that last part.  I asked for a refund again and laid out my extensive lap-timed testing, and I compared the performance with good Sandisk SD cards I had that were 30mb/s and 130mb/s.  IE the first is down around USB1.1 speed and the latter is towards USB2 speeds.  Remember, this item was sold as USB 3.1  !  But the tests of course, showed it was way way down on that, at a 1998 standard of USB1.1 as I said.

So, fast-forward to today I try to pursue ebay’s system to invoke a money back guarantee they have.  The system seems to force the user to go through a RETURN charade, but this seller does not allow returns on this particular item, an SSD.  So after filling in some details, the reason for the return, the ebay system just blocks you from hitting the ‘confirm’ button, or adding in photos.  Fine, so that doesn’t work.

Then I try getting to ebay money-back through any other help or forum area I can - and each time, ebay step by step, gets me back to the ‘purchases’ part of my buyer profile, then I am made sometimes to go directly into the purchased item of the SSD itself, which of course, is only possible to take to one of FOUR actions, I realise in the end, and one of them is ‘contact the seller’ and one is ‘ask for a refund’ and so on.  Nothing interesting, or that works!

Then I am perplexed.  I try to find another angle to get into the ebay ‘help’ or ‘contact us’ and there’s actually NO WAY to get to their people, at all.

I would literally have to lie and try all sorts of other options to get any response!  Even then, everything comes back to the item purchased, and ebay have got that pegged down.

Thre is one other bugbear in the whole rigmarole - that is that there are only certain items eligible for ebay money-back guarantee!  Not that you can find this when you buy something - there is not even so much as an asterisk against the item, to advise you of it’s lowly, unprotected status.

I don’t know if this is one of those items or not.  

So I sit and ponder where this all leaves me - ebay have locked themselves out of helping me.  There is no earthly way to get a hold of ebay, with anything to do with this item.  A bogus, completely wrong item, misdescribed, and with a bluffing seller, who must know full well what they’ve done.  they are not worried or remorseful in the slightest.  An item of storage media, totally without use to me, and overpriced for what it is.  They couldn’t sell this, I think it’s a faulty pile of USB2 SSDs from some factory bin in Shenzhen.

Ebay don’t care, they have their cut.  The seller does not care, they have my money.  I paid direct using ebay’s direct payment they urged people to go onto, and so have not paypal protection.  I am £34.99 out of pocket, and basically am left trying to bluff the Chinese vendor, that ebay give a darn, and I will report him if he does not pay up!  Wing and prayer.  Pass feathers and Bible thanks.

If this seller, toughs it out, I don’t see how I fight it.  

Now somebody reading this might say ‘well, dealing with a chinese seller…’.  To which I would say, really, we can’t do that?  It’s utterly normal, a global ebay marketplace.  Plus, and this is pretty important, I only searched for UK vendors.

The location is given as somewhere in the UK.  But, when you get the business seller registered address, it’s a Shenzhen one (I looked once it was trouble).

The seller has a 100% record too.  You will understand how this can be - people are basically at the seller’s mercy for a refund.  In some way, the seller must convey they won’t refund unless you leave no rating or a 100% rating?  Anyway, I left a one-star rating and said it was thoroughly misdescribed, and why.  That the seller was selling fake USB drives.  That oughtta nail that down - and of course, all the good it will do me.

But, I gave the vendor several days, I did a load of testing.  I asked for a refund, they did not give one.  Now I find, I am on my own, and that made me think of something…that this vendor knows every possible angle, knows that if they sell low-value items of a certain type to us, there is no comeback on ebay, and it is almost impossible for us to get ebay to do anything, in certain categories of goods.  Or someone is advising the seller, of all this.

In other words, given that this seller sells ONLY luminous signs, apart from this sudden excursion into SSD portable drives, I think we can surmise, someone goes around Shenzhen promulgating this sales scam they have, and tells these vendors, how little comeback there is and that they will manage to offload this garbage essentially, and get away, ‘Shenzhen free’.

I am open to ideas.  I have to wait and see if the seller minds the bad feedback and tries to save it by refunding pronto.  I can send them another message, but the fact ebay have me on a loop, means they’ve pretty much cut me loose.  Incidentally, I also sell stuff on ebay and have several hundred sales and a 100% record over the last 15 years.  In other words, a lot of child’s toys no longer used, and a few vintage instruments (Fender bass, Roland Synthesiser).  I am not a reseller, is what I am saying.

Good luck everyone, keep safe, and I am on the look out now for a much more expensive old-school spinning-disk storage drive!  I have a couple already but they are full and only 1Tb in size, which is like kids’ stuff now for what I need backing-up.

May I just clarify as I think I may be misunderstanding
You bought a 4Tb SSD which costs north of £400 from someone like SanDisk here in the UK for £39.99 from an eBay Chinese vendor and are astonished that  it does not work?
This reminds me of the old Chinese memory sticks that used to have the interface tweaked to show 64Gb but were only actually 2Gb in size
I would not be at all surprised if 4Tb is also a fairy story

cx6

There is no way on earth a 4TB USB3 SSD would cost £39.99. 

10x that amount maybe....

You should count yourself lucky it fails - if you had copied all your stuff on there successfully and somewhere later on down the line had tried to retrieve it you would have been in for a shock...

mikb

I didn't notice the 4TB vs £34.99. As per above post, that combo is so unlikely ... you need to find out the true capacity, report this as fake and report the buyer. If the listing is still active, "Report Item" ...

cx6

yes report the item as counterfeit

bris

sleekitwan said:

Try and make this compact, 

Fantastic job making it compact, straight to the point.

mikb

@bris -- it's a risky balance between the two standard MSE responses -- "OMG that has too many words and information, use paragraphs!" and "Why didn't you give all the details in the OP?, stop drip feeding new details all the time!!"