Unlike the last guy I dealt with: I sent him a private
email telling him I =
was disappointed with the condition of his "nice" item (and his photos are =
from stock, not representative), and he was incredibly nasty in his respons=
e. Ooh, I have lots of good feedback, he says. Well, now he has some bad f=
eedback, not over the product (which was oversold) but his crappy attitude.=
... Maybe everyone else was happy, but I'm not. Maybe the rest of us are h=
appy with Larry, but you're not. =20
There are a couple of things that I would 'expect' of any seller, whether
on E-bay or not.
Firstly, the description should be accurate. Saying something is 'nice'
when it's totally beat-up is not 'accurate'. Now, I (and I guess eveyone
else here) try to be reasoanble about this. I know that I am buying a
device that (in many cases) left the factory 30-40 years ago. I do _NOT_
expect it to look brand new. Nor do I expect it to work (things do fail
with time). But if I buy a loose PCB and it's covered in corrosion, etc,
then that's not 'nice'. Sometimes things do exceed my expectations. I
bought a parallel port board for one of my HP machines, it was only a few
pouinds on E-bay. I expected an ex-equipment board. What I got was a
brand new one, in HP anti-static bag, not screatches on the edge fingers
with the manual and stickly labels. Yes, I was very happy.
Secondly, IMHO the makrk of a good seller is not whether or not things
go wrong, becuaseproblems can heppen to anyoen, and it may well not be
the sellers fault. It's how the behave when things go wrong, are they
prepared to work with the buyer to put things right. Of course the buyer
has to be reasonable about it too. A copule of examples, one on E-bay the
other not. I bouigth an HP DAC box from an E-bay seller and it appears to
be lost in shipping (the tracking information said it had left the USA
but not arrived in the UK). The seller offered me a refund after a
sensible time, but I said that hte money was much less useful to me than
the unit, and that as they seemed ot be a surplus dealer who was likely
to get another one sometime, I was happy to let them keep the money and
when they got anoither unit, they could send me that one. They were happy
with this. A couple of days later, the shipping company found the
original parcel and it arrived -- in great condition. So of course I gave
them good feednack. The otehr was a company in England who specialise in
model engineering books -- Camden Miniature Steam Services. I oreders
some books fromthem, and when they came one of them was the wrong book.
The title was identical I think (or very similar), but the author wasn't,
and I'd already got that one. Anyway, I phoned them up, they agreed it
was a mistake and said that I should send the incorrect book abck and
they'd send me the right one. And they did -- very promptly. Needless to
say I've ordered from them again, and wil lrecomend them for such books.
Fortunately, most of the E-bay sellers I've dealt with have been honest
and helpful.
-tony