Royal Mail “Signed for” ebay item not redelivered / collected by buyer & now being sent back to me

tightauldgit

Spoonie_Turtle said:

tightauldgit said:

Money_Grabber13579 said:

BethRobinson said:

General_query said:

So, no blame on the buyer for not going to collect my "signed for" item or arranging a new delivery date then? Madness....

Think of the hundred reasons why they might not have had it redelivered or gone to pick it up 

What a strange comment. If you’ve ordered an item, the least that can be expected is that you will make yourself available to receive it. And if something happens after ordering that you can’t, why should the seller have to suffer the cost of postage and packaging? But unfortunately, that is not the way eBay works.

In fairness its not the way anywhere works. If you buy something online and arent home to receive it then after a while it goes back to the sender but they can't claim back their postage costs from you

Lots of places will treat it as a return and only refund the item cost not the postage.  If it's taken 15+ days then that's lawful.  14 days or under and they should, by law, refund the whole lot (but it's a lot of effort to get that enforced just for the original postage cost so the vast majority of people won't bother).

I would suspect that isn't lawful. If you never received an item you cannot return it. Possibly different if you refuse delivery at the door but I can't see how you can be charged anything when it's technically never left the possession of the seller and their agent (the courier).

Certainly the 14 days to return is from the date you received the parcel - so again I don't see how that applies when you have never received it. 

MR1988

Easiest solution as mentioned by all is to refund buyer and take the small loss.

You could try phone eBay and maybe get someone sympathetic who could offer you any other options. I did have this happen to me 5-6 years ago and eBay looked into it and found buyer at fault for not collecting so they let me keep funds and refunded buyer themselves. But it was an under £20 value item and even so, that is not the norm. You shouldn't get your hopes high.

General_query

Hi, so sorry I never came back to this.

I received my parcel back the next day via Royal Mail (it had that many stickers on the postwoman said it looked like it had been round the world!), and I had to refund the buyer and make a small loss. Not really happy but all finished now and buyer blocked. Thank you for the replies / advice / opinions.

kalsha

I had a similar problem last month.  Buyer opened a request immediately after the expected delivery date passed. On checking the tracking I found that Royal Mail had attempted to deliver 3 times but buyer was not in.  The day before escalation, I rang Ebay and they looked at the tracking info and straight away closed the request in my favour.
Now I have another request opened 2 days ago.  For the last 2 days there was no info on tracking.  But today tracking is showing that delivery was attempted today.  So I guess I will have to go through the same thing again!
I am finding that buyers are too quick to open a request without getting in touch first.  Also deliveries are taking a lot longer due to RM staff shortages.  Last few items have taken 10 days to reach!  I think Ebay should take that into account when forecasting expected delivery times.   And it is not even Christmas rush yet!!

Spoonie_Turtle

I can kind of understand people jumping the gun to opening cases if they're not really thinking, not everyone applies common sense.  But come on, if they've not been home for THREE delivery attempts (which will have left a card - should be each time, but at least one that they should have seen so they know about it) what do they expect you to do??

I really do think three attempted deliveries before returning to sender should mean eBay only make you refund the item price (or take off the postage cost, if it was included in the price).  Ridiculous that sellers are out the postage when it's entirely the buyer's fault it couldn't be delivered, and especially ridiculous with the price of things like Special Delivery.