Possible that it was opened by China Customs who then opened the unit and poked around inside? Customs could have damaged it, not the customer. It then arrives at the customer damaged, with the box intact.
At $4K, any and all Customs would open it for inspection and assessment of duty and taxes.
eBay protocol is that the item is in yours hands until the customer receives it.
Just sitting here thinking.
Customer has sent pictures of the damage? You have insurance? It was damaged in transit. By whom? Don't know, but, it was. This becomes an issue between you and the shipping company.
You contracted them to get it to the customer intact. They failed. .
@femmefan1946 wrote:mr. elmwood makes a good point. But the other half of that point is that your insurance claim against the shipper has nothing to do with your buyer's claim against you.
The two claims should proceed separately.
What the lovely Miss Femme says. You would need to refund the buyer and then proceed with your insurance claim. Procedure is just that.
It finally clicked. The last message the buyer sent to us started with
Look....
So I looked. And this is what I saw...
Here is a section of the preamp before we shipped it, a section by the way, that you would want to replace to make as if it's original and to match the other preamp. The preamp worked fine like this for 25 years, as they were an equivalent replacement for the original caps, which had failed. This was shown and explained in the listing.
Here is the picture he sent us, claiming the damage was due to bad solder joints and poor packing, yet the box, additional cardboard layers, bubble wrap, chassis of the preamp, as well as the other preamp and power supply were all intact and, in his words, in good condition.
I finally took a really close look at this picture tonight, analyzing it, looking at the patterns of the capacitors, resistors, wires, leads... and it quickly became obvious what I was looking at!
Check out how the caps are laying down, the dents on one, the placement of not only the cap with the red top but also the two larger blue caps relative to the bundle of 4 smaller blue caps. The two gray resistors with red stripes (upper left) used to both lead to the other large blue cap (now on the far right, to the right even of the red top cap, which used to be the rightmost cap). Look how leads from the resistors are cut, yet the solder joints are still intact. It's as if that second large blue cap broke free from the leads, jumped through the two resisters and over top all the other caps to land on the far right, knocking everything else over in the process lol
How could the rest of the preamp not be damaged (except for a broken lead on one capacitor in another section, in the middle of several others, pics below, one that you would also, coincidentally, want to replace). And yet these parts have ended up like scrambled eggs. They've obviously been cut out to be replaced, to bring the preamp to original, and then put back in, but all wrongly placed and not even wired or fastened to the chassis, and can just be lifted out (I don't think the technician had a picture of the original layout, which was in the listing). They did this to claim shipping damage and extort a nice sized partial refund, strong arming us with threats of using buyer protection and by opening a request for a return (which I highly doubt they actually want to follow through with). Not to mention our PayPal account has a hold of over $5000 Canadian on it. So I would say we are being scammed.
We initiated the process to close our store today. We've had enough of paying the fees we do and yet dealing with this kind of **bleep** and policies now that seemed biased to the side of the buyer. The escalation specialist I talked to was really of no help, condescending, and I felt like she was just following her script, applying the policy with no real discernment, logic, or empathy for the situation before her.
Here are those other pics, the one capacitor that is different is the only one with not a broken solder joint, but the lead is broken off and appears to have been pushed to the right. Yet the other caps are just fine.
His evidence
Before we shipped
Both preamps worked beautifully before we shipped them. Good thing we made videos and took lots of pictures.
This guy is not getting one penny from us. There's no way I'm going to look like an idiot or complicit in some way with his actions by filing a shipping claim. eBay had better back us up now, or they can take their exorbitant fees, their pathetic new policy, and ... We will never deal on here again and will be checking out bonanza.com. Apparently there are quite a few disenfranchised former eBay sellers on there.
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