A new year and it finally happened, a chargeback! A few posts ago I mentioned how I had not had one in many years, so I was expecting one. Oddly January or February is when they typically happen to me.
Basically if you use tracking and the address is verified, then you are almost certainly protected. I think I've won a lot of cases over the years because of that but I was never told about them. I think many they check the tracking before the claim is even registered. In this case it was my Japan account where we don't use tracking as it's $4 to buy that and we cannot get our customers to pay $4 more for tracking. The item was $6.29 and shipping $3, so we are not going to buy tracking on something as cheap as that. This is basically why most sellers won't ship out of the USA as first class to many countries has no tracking and it costs $13.00 to track the package. Many buyers pull this trick on sellers to get free stuff which is why I only use the Global Shipping Program to send stuff out of the USA.
Anyway people normally go though eBay to file a claim and they get blocked because they are forced to wait our very long arrival time. We have it set for 5 weeks because I know from experience that people will file claims after a few days if they are allowed to. A lot of people get really pissy if it doesn't arrive as fast as everything else they ever ordered from Japan, but the truth is that it's Russian Roulette and who knows when it'll arrive. Either way, this jerk went though Paypal as technically you can file a claim at any time though there. I've had someone do it a couple days after, but I think they had passed a rule that you must wait at least 8 days now.
What pisses me off is that this jerk waited 1 month exactly to file a claim against us. I've noticed several buyers are so precise like that. I think there could be scamming programs out there the files claims that moment they are allowed to or something.
You know, right after Thanksgiving to the second week of December is harsh as packages can be delayed a few extra weeks longer because of Christmas and yet people still expect items to arrive normally. I really should take down all my items for those three weeks. I remember a couple times going on "vacation" during the worse week (the second week of December) just to avoid all this potential crap from happening.
Anyway it's been so long that I had one of these that I was sort of tricked by the form letter Paypal had sent me. It never mentioned a chargeback fee, so I thought if I simply returned the money then everything will be OK, no fee, I'd loose only $9.29 which is no big deal. Nope, a few days later I got a letter saying there was a $20 fee. Oh well!
I've looked around online and there isn't anything I can do about it, which I pretty much knew but I thought I would check in case something had changed over the years. Just eat it up and write it off as a business loss and focus on your customers. It's basically the same conclusion I've come to for whenever something shitty happens to me. I just hate the idea of a $20 fee on a $9.29 dollar refund. Doing the math, it probably cost me around $40 to $50 for a shitty plush that I probably only made a dollar profit on in the first place.
I'm thinking if the person did file a chargeback because he was sick of waiting for his plush then that's a really bad thing for him. Paypal only allows you to do this like twice ever on your account according to the rules. Then again the person will probably just open a new Paypal account with a new card and stuff. If you never give Paypal your full details, then it's easy to do that. As a seller, they pretty much have all my personal details, so I couldn't get away with anything no matter what I try.
You know, chargebacks are actually sort of hard to do. I tried to do it once over a crappy item that I was pissed off about that I couldn't get a refund on and the card wouldn't allow me to file one for some reason. You need a really scammy card company that freely allows chargebacks and mine pretty much treats me like I'm the scum for whatever reason.
For example, when I got my CC number stolen and a few dozen transactions appeared in a minutes time, they treated me like I was negligent and I had to verbally dispute every charge, which took an hour as there were tons of them. It was so freaking stupid but they insisted every one had to be read and I had to say no. Then a couple weeks later I got a ream of legal documents to sign my life away and it was inoculating like I was the one at fault and I'm probably the one scamming everyone and I have no rights, blah blah blah.
Man! All that happened is that I used my card on a eyeglasses website, they got hacked, my number stolen and it was sold on the black web and then at least 50 people charged stuff up in a minute before they froze my account. And yet I'm the crook? Whatever.
Anyway, I'm just venting as it sucks to have chargebacks. Nothing you really can do but get pissy about it. It gets easier though after it happens enough times to you. Just turn the other cheek and get slapped on that side too someday.
Something else I was thinking, it could have been a child that used their parents card to get stuff. I've had this happen a lot and the parent, instead of taking any responsibility for their child, they report the card as an illegal use. The seller gets screwed and the kid probably gets the item for free and the parents pay nothing. That's the worse type of chargeback and I think is the one that happens the most as I deal in used toys a lot. I firmly believe if my child had ever done that, then it's my fault, not the sellers. The seller should not have to pay for my mistake. Bad parenting basically. But I've learned long ago that people are shitty and they do shitty things to one another like that rather than take any responsibility.