Did your buyer give you an unfair negative?

2009-04-23T23:16:00.008+03:00

A lot of sellers receive negative feedbacks on ebay, daily. Some times, sellers deserve that negative feedback. I am a buyer too and I know how things go. You buy an mp3 player from a seller and... ALAS, it's not working, it's not as advertised, it's got hacked memory and so on. Sometimes sellers set their shipping to high and their price too low and say if you want to return the item for a refund, I will not refund shipping charges. Buyers are in the middle of nowhere with a non-working mp3 player and don't know what to do. They have just bought it for $0,99 and it doesn't worth to send it back to the seller to get a refund of $0,99 (minus paypal fees). These sellers, really deserve a negative feedback.

But, what happens if a seller has fulfilled all his responsibilities and instead of receiving a positive feedback he has to face an idiot buyer who does not respect the seller, a buyer without a brain, without common sense, without morality or a psycho.

Recently, I sold an item and after I sent the invoice, I didn't hear a word from the buyer.
One week later, I decided to send a payment reminder. The buyer won an item whose value was $3 and he won it for less than $1. It took her around ten days to pay for it.
The same day, I sent the item to her.
A few days later, there she comes with an email almost upset with me. At that moment I realized this person does not even has a complete personality. She was shouting that the item fell out of the envelope and blackmailed me to give her a full refund IMMEDIATELY to avoid filing an ebay dispute.
A normal person would have never been that much upset unless the seller replied in a bad manner.
Before replying to her email, I wanted to get some advice from an ebay live agent about that matter. The agent kindly told me that I have to report the buyer to the trust and safety department so she had to prove that the envelope was empty.
As I am on ebay for more than 2 years without receiving a negative, I was worrying about that and I asked the agent to let me know, if ebay can remove that kind of negative in case the buyer leaves it. The agent told me not to afraid and that the appropriate ebay department can review and remove the negative.
In order to avoid messing with that buyer, I decided to go the easy way and give her a full refund.
I gave her a full refund and I emailed her and said that I was sorry about the matter and as ebay says, I would like to both exchange positive feedbacks once the problem is solved.
She immediately replied that she accepts my apologies and that she has fulfilled all of her duties as a buyer and that I am the one that has to leave positive first and she will return the positive for me later.
Again, as I didn't want to dissatisfy her, I left the positive feedback and explained that ebay rules say that buyers must leave feedback first in order the seller to see the buyer is satisfied. (this is in the feedback reminder of customized store emails)
She replied in a very strange manner and she insulted me by saying I am stubborn and that I should give positive by the time she paid and I am not ethical and so on.
I replied once more and told her not to give me morality lessons and I did exactly as I was supposed to and I even didn't report her to the trust and safety department as I was instructed.
She replied once more with the following comments "Like I said, unethical, stubborn, rude, arrogant, poor excuse for a living creature!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

That was it!!! I decided to report her to the trust and safety department for blackmailing me and for insulting me.
Later that day, I received a reply from ebay writing:
Thank you for writing eBay in regard to the email you received.

We've investigated your report about the buyer, and we've taken
appropriate action. Depending on the circumstances, this could range
from a warning to closing the member's account.

For privacy reasons, we can't discuss the details of our investigation
with you. I hope this assures you that your account history will also
remain private.

The next day, I had my first beautiful negative feedback from her!

I have contacted ebay to remove that "Unfair" negative but... no way!

From now on, I will be using the pre-approve buyers option on ebay so that the buyers cannot actually buy until I check their feedbacks and approve them to buy my items.
A great tool to see the negative feedbacks of a buyer is toolhaus.
here is the link:
http://www.toolhaus.org

That's the main purpose of that blog.
I want to exchange experiences with other sellers who are dissatisfied by their transactions with other members and have a conversation in here.
So go on and write your story at give.neg@gmail.com and I will post it right here.
Please do not use bad language and write in english.

Thank you

Give Negative

Did your buyer give you an unfair negative?