When you buy things on eBay, you pay the seller before they send you anything. This means that you, as a buyer, are vulnerable to all sorts of problems. You might not get the items you have paid for, or they might be damaged or faulty.
Luckily, you have two very important rights when you buy on eBay.
The Right to Receive Your Item.
Maybe the seller never sent the item, or maybe it got lost in the post. Whatever happened, you paid for the item. If it does not arrive in the post as described, you have the right to a replacement or a refund, whether it is the seller’s fault or not.
The fact that you bought something on eBay does not mean that you do not have the exact same rights that you would have if you bought it in a shop (these rights are pretty much the same all over the world). Plus, under eBay’s rules, the seller is not allowed to change their mind about selling you the item: once the auction ends, it becomes a contract – you must buy and they must sell, or face eBay’s penalties.
The Right for Your Item to Be as Described in the Auction.
Sometimes sellers do not wrap items properly, and so they get broken. Occasionally they write descriptions that are misleading or just plain wrong to begin with, leaving out vital details that would have caused you to change your mind about buying. If this happens to you, you again have the right to a replacement or a refund.
So How Do I Use My Rights?
First, you should take it up with the seller as most will be responsive, and do not want to have their reputation damaged when an upset buyer leaves negative feedback for all their future buyers to see. If that does not work, report them to eBay.
While eBay does not have many people handling complaints, they do have a relatively effective set of automatic process to handle common problems buyers and sellers have with one another.
Finally, if that does not work, then you should seek advice from consumer groups in your country, and as a last resort from the police. However, you should never have to get this far. Problems on eBay that cannot be resolved easily are extremely rare.
Don’t Be Too Quick To Complain.
Remember not to get too annoyed and be unfair to the seller. Nice sellers have agreed to give me refunds for undelivered items, only for me to find out a few weeks later that they were being held for me at the post office! Always try your best to communicate and think of everything that might have gone wrong. eBay works best when buyers and sellers sort out their problems together, instead of reporting each other to the authorities straight away.
More often that not receiving what they paid for, buyers have an altogether different problem. T hey knew what they were paying for, but did not realise that what they were paying for was overpriced, low quality or a scam.
The next posting will give you a list of tips on how to avoid being ripped off on eBay.
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Stay tuned,
Christer
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eBay was created in September 1995, by a man called Pierre Omidyar, living in San Jose, California, USA. He wanted his site – at that time called ‘AuctionWeb’ – to be an online marketplace, and wrote the first code for it in one weekend. It was one of the first websites of its kind in the world. The name ‘eBay’ comes from the domain Omidyar used for his site. His company’s name was Echo Bay, and the ‘eBay AuctionWeb’ was originally just one part of Echo Bay’s website at ebay.com. The first thing ever sold on the site was Omidyar’s broken laser pointer, which he got $14 for.
The site quickly became massively popular, as sellers came to list all sorts of odd things and buyers actually bought them. Relying on trust seemed to work remarkably well, and meant that the site could almost be left alone to run itself. The site had been designed from the start to collect a small fee on each sale, and it was this money that Omidyar used to pay for the expansion of AuctionWeb. The fees quickly added up to more than his current salary, and so he decided to quit his job and work on the site full-time. It was at this point, in 1996, that he added the feedback facilities, to let buyers and sellers rate each other and make buying and selling safer.
In 1997, Omidyar changed AuctionWeb’s – and his company’s – name to ‘eBay’, which is what people already had been calling the site for a long time. He began to spend a lot of money on advertising, and had the eBay logo designed. It was in this year that the one-millionth item was sold (it was a toy version of Big Bird from Sesame Street).
Then, in 1998 – the peak of the dotcom boom – eBay became big business, and the investment in Internet businesses at the time allowed it to bring in senior managers and business strategists, who took in public to the stock market. It began to encourage people to sell more than just collectibles, and quickly became a massive site where you could sell anything, large or small. Unlike many other equivalent sites, though, eBay survived the end of the boom, and is still going strong today.
1999 saw eBay go worldwide, launching sites in the UK, Australia and Germany. eBay bought half.com, an Amazon-like online retailer, in the year 2000 – the same year it introduced Buy it Now – and bought PayPal, an online payment service, in 2002.
Pierre Omidyar has now earned an estimated $3 billion from eBay, and still serves as Chairman of the Board. Oddly enough, he keeps a personal weblog at http://pierre.typepad.com. There are now literally millions of items bought and sold every day on eBay, all over the world. For every $100 spent online worldwide, it is estimated that $14 is spent on eBay – that’s a lot of laser pointers.
Now that you know the history of eBay, perhaps you also would like to know how it could work for you? In coming posts, I will give you an idea of the vast possibilities and what products to get in order to become successful with eBay
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Stay tuned,
Christer
BTW
Do you also remember to FOLLOW ME on Twitter?
My new content from all my web pages is also going there
If you find the information useful, please don’t hesitate to Tweet or email the post to your friends and colleagues and set up a link on your own blog!
http://twitter.com/christerfolke
eBay is a business regardless how look at it. I agree, it is a great deal of fun for both the buyers and sellers, but when you look at it from more serious point of view, you will see that it is a business from the seller’s perspective, from the buyer’s perspective, and most definitely from eBay’s perspective.
More than 40 million dollars a day travels through eBay. Selling items on eBay successfully is an art in itself, and eBay offers many different forms of Data and Research resources to ensure that you are selling the right items, to the right people, in the right way. (to the right price?)
Some of the data and research resources are not free, but pretty much of it is.
The available resources include
- hot items by category
- eBay Pulse
- merchandising calendar
- sales reports
- marketplace research
- buyer behavioural report
- the eBay solutions directory.
These tools are quite easy to use, and the information that can be extracted from them is extremely valuable.
The Data and Research tools are all accessible through your seller’s account, by clicking on the ‘Advance Selling’ link. Learn to use those tools, and see to that you get your piece of that $40 million eBay revenue each day.
* * * * *
If you are serious about making real money with eBay and on the Internet, you must get the book
“The Silent Sales Machine Hiding On eBay”
Who else wants a part of the $24 Billion eBay boom…
The book reveals ways to sell on eBay where your risk of loss is virtually eliminated.
Where you risk almost nothing and your profits can be massive.
In just a few months time this book shot up to be the most popular eBook site on the Internet.
Click here now to download the book!
- The Silent Sales Machine Hiding On eBay
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Stay tuned,
Christer
BTW
Do you also remember to FOLLOW ME on Twitter?
My new content from all my web pages is also going there
If you find the information useful, don’t hesitate to Tweet or email the post to your friends and colleagues and set up a link on your own blog!
http://twitter.com/christerfolke