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Very frustrated at the moment.
I had a buyer in Canada purchase a police scanner through Global Shipping. A return case was opened not long after delivery. Buyer says in return message that my United States police scanner uses 6 digit frequency codes, but in Canada, they use 7 digits. Because of that, he can’t use the scanner and he’d like to return it. Of course, he marked it as Item Not As Described so I would have to pay the return shipping.
Anyway, he never claimed the item was damaged or that I somehow misrepresented it, but merely that it is not compatible with Canadian police frequencies. I sent a message that he can return it, but he is responsible for return shipping and I have a 20% restocking fee.
I called eBay customer service and asked what to do next. The service rep agreed that I should not be responsible for return shipping. She said I should accept the return, but don’t do anything after that (which is the screen for providing a return shipping label). She said to wait 5 days, then call eBay and they would cancel the return.
Today, the buyer somehow immediately escalated the return because I did not provide a shipping label. An eBay rep reviewed the case and decided against me. They said I am required to pay return shipping for this item. I was so mad. I called eBay again and asked what happened, since I followed the instructions the eBay reps provided. She said that because I sell internationally, “technically,” I should have described that the police scanner will not work in other countries. This is apparently grounds for an Item Not As Described case. Seems like a flimsy argument to me.
Well, they said I have to wait 5 days to appeal the case. I thought this would be a slam dunk in my favor, but now I don’t know. I’m sure as heck going to exhaust my options, though.
Am I in the wrong here? Or is my reasoning logical?
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the last time this happened to me with GSP i was told that the buyer was responsible for all shipping, even through hassle free returns. maybe that was a while ago, but i believe it walks you through the steps or providing a label and you have the choice to say ‘i cannot provide a label for this country’. did you choose that? and is that why they escalated? that is a bummer, for sure.
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Total BS. You are NOT responsible for knowing if the item is compatible with their countries broadcast system. That was a CS rep talking out of their bum.
Customer didn’t do their homework and this is buyers remorse.My gosh the returns system on ebay so incredibly broken.
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Update: I called eBay again this evening. I used the magic words (“buyer’s remorse”) and after she reviewed the case for a few minutes, she agreed. The buyer will be required to pay return shipping. My faith in eBay has been restored.
Not entirely sure what happened before. I think when a buyer is pro-active and calls eBay, the reps have a tendency to cave in and give the buyer what they want. And I think the rep I called yesterday was 1)not very confident in her job and 2)really confused because it was a technical issue with the product. I kept my argument much simpler this time, quickly laying out the process of events and then saying I felt this was a clear case of buyer’s remorse.
Thanks everyone for the good advice.
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Our returns on amazon are under 2%, we don’t deal with them at all, and we won our only A to Z claim. I know Amazon has a bad rap, but our experience is very different (we stay away from selling used and don’t buy stuff that has shelf wear to pass off as new, so there’s that) and we have over 20,000 items sold in 26 months.
I get that the buyers lie, and we get poked in the shorts with the return “fees” but overall we do really well.
We request items back that are actually returned to try to figure out what happened. Nine times out of ten there is nothing wrong nor was it opened. In the rare instance it was damaged by Amazons crappy shipping methods and we get fully reimbursed. But the number of actual returns is under 2%, SO ultimately we don’t care.
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Before I start with my rah rah Amazon is awesome speech, it is difficult.
And the recent changes make it a lot more tough for us and certainly for someone that is getting started.
We started out in September 2014 by sending in puzzles, books, and new old stock. We did okay, but as most folks that transition from eBay, found the fees to be high and the complaints to be many. But the volume was addicting. So we got ungated in many categories when the standards were soft. And we were very lucky.
We are primarily in health and beauty. That has changed. We did very well in other categories but our suppliers dried up. We moved around and ultimately found our niche in health and beauty. We do very well on discontinued lines that have a huge following and we can grab huge margins.
Our first “success” story was ortho volck oil spray. It was discontinued, we bought at a quarter a bottle, and we sold it as fast as we could get it in for $45 a bottle. We reinvested every penny.
Today, we are big into health and beauty. We have actually white labeled a product that we have sold just over 20,000 units. We make a lincoln on each one with about a 1.50 cost per unit and we sell about 20 a day.
It’s stressful as we have to constantly navigate Amazons random changes and competiton. Our own product has been improperly categorized on 8 occasions and it kills sales. But overall we are making enough to support our lifestyle.
Probably way more than you wanted to know, but there it is.
It’s hard work, but we control our future to a large degree and that is all we can ask.
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I really appreciate you sharing this experience. I’ve always wanted to ask a question of someone that has a white label product on FBA:
-is there a period of time before someone else sees your success and then moves in on your product?
–how many did you have to buy up front to out in the white label order?
–do you have them shipped to you, and then you ship to FBA?
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Once we got our sales ranking under 8000, we had someone scrape the listing and offer a product that was not the same. We dealt with that, and now we have direct competition which is causing us to drop the price and spend more on promotions. It is still good money for the time spent although I don’t think we will continue to sell this product for more than a couple of months. Once the competition gets to be too much we will just launch something else.
Our minimum order quantity was 350 units. However, we have bought other things to launch where you can get started with 100. We have also walked away from items that required 2 or 3,000. We don’t want to commit to something that may fail.
We have it shipped to our door so we can inspect and make sure the quality is where it should be and then ship to the warehouse. We could have the skus applied at the manufacturer and then have them ship directly to the warehouse but we want to make sure it is okay first.
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