Ongoing strange issue with Seller - Any advice how to proceed?

[jason-w]

Hi all, I am wondering if anyone has any advice to offer on how I should proceed given the situation detailed below"

On Monday I won an auction of several items from a single US based seller.  After I had paid for all of the items I got a notice that the seller had requested to cancel the transaction because 'They do not ship to Canada'. (The listing CLEARLY indicated they would ship to Canada).  I wrote to ask the seller what was up, and offered to amicably cancel as long as I got my refund but I got no response.

At the time I posted a message on here about that and got some input from other users which lead me to contact Ebay support.  Ebay suggested that I just go ahead and agree to the cancel request by the seller. 

The seller did not return any of the 3 message I sent on Monday/Tuesday and I had no expectation they were going to send the item so I just went ahead and agreed to cancel expected that I would eventually get a refund processed.

Instead of a refund - several (6-ish) hours after I had agreed to the cancellation the seller suddenly marked all of my items as shipped.  Again, no response to my messages - at this point I assume I am just going to get ignored.

My first thought was ok fine, if it arrives then I'm happy since that's all I wanted.   I was actually more worried that the refund would get automatically processed even though the items were en route and I would have to deal with paying them again.

The items were listed as shipped on Tuesday afternoon, and now it's Friday afternoon and the tracking status just says Tracking Number Provided and there is no sign of it being in transit.  In addition if I look at the USPS tracking it says:  Shipping Label Created, USPS Awaiting Item - and has said this all week.     

Is that in any way normal? I mean I ordered 2 other items from the US within a day or so of these items and within ours the status went from Shipping Label created to In Transit.  My concern is they are acting in bad faith in a way which means they won't have to issue my refund because they can claim that the item has been shipped - even though the tracking number doesn't reflect this.  Am I reading too much into this.  I've been using Ebay a long time (though infrequently) and never had a single problem in that time.

Thanks to anyone who chooses to chime in with some advice.

All the best,

Jason

[jason-w]

Just to close this out for anyone who read it... this all turned nasty in the end. The seller relisted some of the items which he claimed to have shipped to me so I had to ask Ebay for intervention.