Today I got the final claim from that Spain buyer mentioned below. That's 8 in total and there should be one more from a second account that he's pulling the same scam on. I know it's the same person as I saw some of the same sellers on both accounts. I filed reports on him to ebay, but I know it doesn't do jack shit. They don't even read them. But I'm hoping anyway.
----------
So I was trying to cool off about that Spain situation by reading the eBay seller forum posts. Basically to be a seller you have to well arm yourself against new policy rules and current buyer scams and read up about them from other sellers every now and then.
I came across something called "Arbitrage Resellers" which I have never heard of before. It seems that people buy on eBay and then flip on Amazon for practically pennies. Or they may steal entire listings and list it on some strange third world website with a slight mark-up. I've actually seen my items on these websites but I thought it was some eBay partnership. It's more likely that there are programs out there mining eBay data and listing stuff to others for a slight profit.
So anyway this is obviously what had happened with that Pokemon game buyer I was talking about a few posts ago. I'm pretty sure that a foreign buyer bought the item. It takes around a month for all that turn around time and the item to arrive to his buyer.
It explains why it took 5 weeks to get a bad feedback from him about it not working. And why there was no return. It would have took him another month to get the item back and by then the ebay claim period would have expired. He could have done something with Paypal as they allow 180 days but they do limit your claims to something insane like two a year. So he was basically stuck! Assuming the item was bad, which I highly doubt!
Anyway I feel that it was obvious that HIS buyer was the one scamming him. His buyer lied over the game not working because that happens a lot with video games. Doubly so if they found out that they could have bought the same thing for a couple dollars less elsewhere. I've had several returns and refunds over games and whenever I get them back, I test them out and found nothing wrong and I end up reselling them again. In his case (as with so many before) it was obviously some scammer just looking to scam.
What pisses me off is that it's really wrong to go back and blame the person you bought from for your own bad transaction. It is your duty to check over and to test the items you are flipping. I buy stuff all the time but I never ever go back and blame someone for something I bought because I got it home and it was a piece of crap or someone else found fault with it. That's just a dirtbag thing to do. You just take the loss and do better next time. Learn to test items out before leaving a yard sale and certainly before you actually flip it to someone else.
Anyway, at first none of this transaction made any sense. Like why leave bad feedback and not return the game? Also I had an email at the time of shipping saying it was a birthday gift and to not include an invoice. That was suspicious but whatever, it was plausible enough. Turns out that was complete bullshit coming from him as I read over his feedback and found a seller comment on his "birthday gift" giving. No...he buys 100s of items a month and they are being immediately flipped. I like the idea of that, but it's scummy to blame sellers for your failings though.
It does also explain why he rarely leaves feedback to anyone other than on bad transactions. He has no clue if the items work when he reships them. He only reacts (with bad feedback) when he himself gets bad feedback or returns on the items he resells. What a real dirtbag!
So basically I got burned by HIS buyer. That is really low thing to do and it's a new one on me. Oh well, it takes all types! I've noticed a lot of reshippers buying my stuff but that's because I refuse to ship out of the USA and they go to strange addresses which are obviously reshipping warehouses. This is the first time I've noticed an actual reseller though!
Anyway this Sunday is the yearly Comic Show and I hope to find something interesting to buy and comment on. I'm just expecting more of the same yearly pickups that I refuse to pay full cover price on though.
I think the following Sunday is the Record Show and I'll do the same. We'll see. Sadly I didn't get any decent records this year. Another off year. Actually I think the resellers are buying record collections like mad as I see anything with pop/rock from the 70s-80s are worth at least $3 each in bulk. It would explain why I rarely find any popular LPs lately.
But over all this year was a really good one for buying general random stuff to flip. I expect one of my better profit years in quite sometime. I had 3 bad luck years in a row, but honestly two of those was because I could only work about 40 percent of normal as I had to take care of my mom. This year I've really busted my butt gathering inventory and it seems I'll be well rewarded this year for it.