I recently bought two identical items from a U.S. seller, totaling around $800. When I received the shipment a few weeks later, and paid the UPS brokerage & duties, there was only one item in the box, yet on the customs form, it clearly indicated there were 2 and the total declared value was for both.
Upon contacting the seller, they told me the second item was not available, and I'd have to wait another week for them to bring one in, and presumably 2 weeks after that for the gruelingly slow UPS ground shipping where I'll have to pay yet more brokerage fees.
Now I'm generally a chill guy and I'm quite happy to forgive an honest mistake, but in this case I'm seeing a lot of missed opportunities to fix said mistake.
- they sold something that wasn't in stock, which is against eBay's TOS. This to me is the "honest mistake" part.
- they failed to inform me of the missing item when they were processing the sale two weeks ago - at that point I could have asked for a partial refund and saved us both a lot of grief
- even as they packed and shipped only one item, they misrepresented the customs declaration - I had to pay import fees on the missing item as a result.
- I contacted the seller with this info, and asked for a partial refund of the one item + the $90 in excess import fees that directly resulted from their series of errors, then all would be well, I'd give good feedback and drop my case. I even sent them a copy of the manifest document, showing their error and the amount paid. They declined, and now are telling me to wait until they receive more stock to ship me. The partial refund is now off the table.
I know the import fees don't go to the seller, but my perspective is the $90 is a direct result of their extremely poor handling of the situation. They quite plainly wrote incorrect info on the customs declaration, which is customs fraud. I've already contacted the customs office and UPS to find out my options, and my sole recourse in their eyes is to file a fraud claim against the vendor.
I feel like I've offered a very reasonable choice to the seller, who not only breached eBay's terms of service but also international export law, and on top of it behaved quite irresponsibly from a customer service perspective by not informing me of the missing item. This is a seller that has over 10,000 feedback and 10+ years as an eBay member, they should know better.
So my question to my fellow forum dwellers is: should I escalate this to a Paypal dispute ?
