eBay

momcqueen · ‎09-01-2017

I share this so that others may learn from my experience and/or mistakes.

I had a false Significantly Not As Described (SNAD) Case opened on an item sold to a zero-feedback buyer in the USA in mid-July. It was sent with tracking and delivered without issue but a few days later, I discover the buyer has opened a SNAD because she received 'only one of the items and not the ten she expected to receive'. Huh? She only bought and paid for one although the listing states there were ten+ available to purchase.

Okay, I approve the Return because it's all I can do at this point, either that or ignore it which we all know will lead to a big pile of trouble with ebay. And I decided that I wasn't going to just cave and send a refund to make it go away, as I didn't do anything wrong. I call Customer Service, worried that I will be forced to send Return Postage for an item I neither misdescribed nor incorrectly fulfilled.

I was pleasantly surprised to hear the Customer Service Representative agree with me. He said it was good that I had accepted the Return request but it was clear from the case details and the messages between the buyer and I that she only ordered and paid for one so had no actual reason to expect ten and therefore it wasn't a SNAD case but Remorse Return and I was not obligated to fund return postage. 'But who's going to tell the buyer that?' I ask. 'We will,' he says. (I am paraphrasing here.)

A few more days pass and the buyer sends me another message stating she's impatiently waiting for her return postage label to be sent. I politely explain again that she only ordered and paid for one of ten+ identical items available and I would be happy to accept her return but that the cost of postage to return it with tracking is hers to bear and not mine, and that ebay Customer Service has confirmed this detail with me. She promptly replies it will cost too much to send back and quotes a cost that can only be Priority Service postage. I politely encourage her to check First Class Mail costs and use that instead.

No word from the buyer for three weeks or so. It's been almost a full month, and there has been no movement on the case, and nothing returned to me. Day 30 comes and I get a message from ebay one night at about 11:30 pm asking me to confirm the item is returned because 'the buyer told them it had been shipped back' and telling me I have until Sept. 11 to issue a refund.

I re-check the case, no tracking was issued on a return parcel and I know for certain that nothing untracked came back so I select not the Refund button but the Ask Ebay for Help button instead. This opens a formal Case for escalation. Again, I worry it will close against me by bots because they will skim the surface of it and see I failed to issue Return Postage. I explain my side again as best as I can with the text option available to submit more information, and wait.

The next morning I go to print a shipping label for another order and discover I can't use paypal to fund it because my account is suddenly now frozen for the amount of the false SNAD case. It went from plain Return to Disputed case states because I asked to escalate the case, and this irks me a bit. I have to instead link a credit card to my Shippo account because paypal won't even process a payment to the credit card linked to it while it's in the red.

Annoyed, I call ebay Customer Service again to see if they can decide this case (and unfreeze my paypal account) sooner than the 48 hours they promise it takes to review the case and do so.

Again, I am worried that I am in some kind of trouble for not sending the return postage for a case that was opened as a SNAD but was clearly in reality Remorse. No, after talking to two Reps, the final one of which was in the Escalation Department, the case is closed in my favour. This means the funds are unfrozen, there is no punishment doled out to me on my account, and the buyer isn't allowed to leave Feedback of any kind, and this is because she didn't return anything when she was instructed to do so.

Of course, had she sent the item back, the refund would have been hers. It would have only cost her $10 USD in postage but I guess she decided it wasn't worth the hassle, I don't know. I can't really speculate as to what was happening on her side. Was this really a first-time buyer or just a new account? A guest account? It had one of those non-sensical user names generated now.

My take-away from this? Study all the instructions that ebay gives you on Returns, SNAD or otherwise, and follow all their commands except the ones that make no sense. When you find instructions that make no sense to your circumstances, call Customer Service and ask for clear direction. I expected the worst both times when I did call-in and was pleasantly surprised to see they understood my dilemma and supported me as a seller with the problem that I faced.

As to the item that caused all these problems, I looked long and hard at the listing to see where the misunderstanding may have generated. Was the shopper on a mobile device and thought quantity ten+ available meant there were ten included? The listing title and description itself clearly states it's for one and to order as many as is required. Did the price-point set unrealistic expectations? Possibly, as I have included free domestic postage in the asking price and it was bought by a buyer in the USA which seemed a little odd to me at the time but then again I thought she might want it as a gift for someone else and it did come in a decorative bag which would have satisfied that gifty-criteria.

In the end, I created a second listing like the first but as a clear bundle of ten like she expected at an appropriate price. Revised somewhat the price on the exact item listing that she bought to set more realistic expectations. Added another Item Specific to lay out for the third-time it's for a single item and to buy as many as required.

Like I said at the onset, I'm sharing this to broaden our understanding of what a seller can and cannot do when greeted with the much-dreaded false-SNAD. I can think of at least a few other examples in the past where sellers have stated that things did not go well with their false-SNADs and held ebay Customer Service in large part responsible for failing to understand the nuances of the problem. That has certainly long been a refrain of mine too, that CSRs seem simply to not understand what they are being told, but I have to suspect ebay heard our wails of distress and have implemented more seller-friendly changes to this process. Or better-trained Customer Services Reps. Or both.

hlmacdon · ‎09-01-2017

If you get ahold of the North American support people (can be distinguished in the help/contact workflows as the non 24/7 phone support number) cases like this are generally easy to resolve over the phone if the buyer has chosen a non-buyer's remorse reason inappropriately. It's a good idea to keep some funds available in your paypal account as even returns put a hold equivalent to the original amount of the transaction and the hold will last as long as the return is open.

Unfortunately ebay has a buyer problem these days as I tend to waste a lot of time with zero feedback/guest checkout buyers. The stupid changes they keep making to the mobile side, vis a vis hiding descriptions, altering descriptions, etc aren't helping. As it is smartphones have had an extremely negative effect on the competence of the casual online shopper.

momcqueen · ‎09-01-2017

Yes, I had cleared all the funds from PayPal only an hour before the 'do you need help with this?' email came. (I use paypal to shop.) But the funds weren't frozen when the SNAD was opened, only when I escalated it.

pjcdn2005 · ‎09-01-2017

I'm really glad that it worked out for you but I've read about many situations about false snad situations when the result is that the buyer is refunded without having to make a return and the seller receives an out of stock defect. It is always risky for the seller to ask ebay to step in but especially so when the seller takes returns and a false snad has been filed.

eBay does not have a good way to handle these type of claims. They generally take the buyer's word for it as it often (though not in your case) is a he said/she said situation. One of the reasons why it worked out for you is because the buyer basically said that they expected more than what was stated in the listing and that's easy enough to prove because ebay can see your listing. If the buyer had said that the item you sent out was damaged and you said no it wasn't, the result may be have been different. Or not...obviously not everything is handled the same way every time.

Anyway...bravo for taking a stand and following through.

momcqueen · ‎09-01-2017

Yes, I'm fortunate in that it was very clear the buyer acknowledged what they received (and that it matched the order) and then demanded to know the reason there wasn't a quantity of ten times that in the order.

rose-dee · ‎09-02-2017

@pjcdn2005 wrote:
"...I've read about many situations about false snad situations when the result is that the buyer is refunded without having to make a return and the seller receives an out of stock defect."

I don't understand. Why would a seller receive an out of stock defect if the item had already been sent (and therefore clearly "in stock" at the time of dispatch)? The only time a seller should get such a defect is if he/she were unable to ship and refunded the buyer at that point. Perhaps there is more to the situations you mention than the sellers are disclosing.

A seller in 'mj's' situation who has already successfully delivered the item should be able to choose to refund without the buyer returning the item if the seller decides it's the easiest route to avoid the buyer escalating the SNAD case (or to avoid issues around returning). I realize this isn't what happened in this instance, but my understanding was that an immediate refund after delivery should never generate a defect. If it did, I think I'd be on the phone to eBay pronto.

momcqueen · ‎09-02-2017

I suspect pj meant the 'not resolved by seller' defect which appears in the same area of the Dashboard as the 'out of stock' defect.

rose-dee · ‎09-02-2017

@mjwl2006 wrote:

As to the item that caused all these problems, I looked long and hard at the listing to see where the misunderstanding may have generated. Was the shopper on a mobile device and thought quantity ten+ available meant there were ten included? The listing title and description itself clearly states it's for one and to order as many as is required. Did the price-point set unrealistic expectations? Possibly, as I have included free domestic postage in the asking price and it was bought by a buyer in the USA which seemed a little odd to me at the time [...].

I think your intuition about this was right. I've always been a bit concerned about rolling domestic shipping into asking prices on multi-quantity items for this reason. I agree with 'hlmacdon' that, as more and more buyers use mobile for their purchases, there are going to be more and more buyers not paying attention.

So I would say that the real takeaway here is not so much how to do battle with eBay (which can be inconsistent and unpredictable, as we've all discovered at one time or another) but how to try to reasonably foresee and avoid these kinds of pitfalls in advance -- and maybe, just maybe benefit from them through good PR when they do occur. Although the outcome with eBay CS was positive for you in this instance, it's also possible things could have gone awry. I'd say you did exactly the right thing in adjusting your listing afterward.

By the way, what was the original price on the item, and the rolled-in shipping amount? What was your actual acquisition cost of the item? Would you have been able to consider making a refund without requiring return of the item and simply written off the loss? Presumably you have very few SNAD claims to create losses.

In some situations I think that might be preferable to getting further entangled in a fight with eBay over relatively few dollars and, although not being out of pocket for the item cost, possibly ending up with a blocked Paypal account, a defect, a whole lot of stress, and an unhappy customer. I also take into account my time at minimum wage. I think my personal cut-off would be somewhere around $40 to $50 (my cost of the item) and an hour of my time.

I'm certainly not saying your buyer wasn't at fault for being inattentive -- she absolutely was. Still, was there intent to deceive on her part? It doesn't seem like it. So was it a truly false SNAD, or did the (admittedly foolish) buyer feel cheated herself? I can imagine that buyers who don't read listing information because they're in too much of a hurry to buy are unlikely to want to bother going to the post office to return an item (especially to another country), even if it is only a $10 shipping cost. That's fairly predictable.

Maybe part of the equation for sellers is to try to anticipate this possibility in our listings and head it off where we can. When a rare false SNAD does occur for an otherwise good seller, the quickest and simplest resolution of the problem may sometimes be to consider an immediate refund without the fuss of a return or the fuss of dealing with eBay. I realize some will say this would be "rewarding" stupid buyers, but I think it's a balance between monetary loss, potential defects, and long-run personal stress tolerance, rather than seeing right or wrong battles.

Here's a possible alternative business choice. Imagine in the same rare scenario simply refunding the buyer immediately (without requiring a return, but with a polite explanation of her misunderstanding and an apology for her disappointment), then revising the listing so it won't be as likely to occur again. Yes, there would be a monetary loss. But there might also be a happy customer who might come back and actually read the listing next time. And might tell all her neighbours and friends, or all her followers on social media. If an expensive item is involved, this choice in handling it may not make sense. Or maybe it does. An ounce of good PR online can be worth a ton of potential sales, if the buyer herself was just foolish, and not a deliberate scammer.

We sellers have to remember that buyers have this kind of power these days, both for positive and negative use. I sometimes think eBay's treatment of us is no longer the biggest thing we need to be cognizant of.

I'm just offering another perspective for sellers to consider.

momcqueen · ‎09-02-2017

Yes, in principle I agree. I do like all eBay buyers to leave happy which is the reason every one of my customers gets a not-insignificant-but-modest free gift with purchase as well as on-time shipping and well-packed items. I didn't feel compelled to compensate for this lady's error because she opened it as a SNAD as opposed to an actual Return with no prior communication.

pjcdn2005 · ‎09-02-2017

You're right, I meant an unresolved claim defect, sorry for any confusion.

rose-dee · ‎09-03-2017

@mjwl2006 wrote:
I didn't feel compelled to compensate for this lady's error because she opened it as a SNAD as opposed to an actual Return with no prior communication.

Without speculating about the buyer's motives (or her actual experience as an eBay buyer), part of the reason for this could be that eBay makes it far too easy for buyers to open cases, and not so easy for them to simply communicate back and forth with their sellers.

momcqueen · ‎09-05-2017

I don't know. Had the buyer simply sent me a message seeking clarification about quantity after delivery, or had messaged me expressing her disappointment only one was included instead of ten, I most likely would have handled this differently. As a buyer, I have always spoken to the seller about any shortcomings I perceived with my order before taking official action with ebay. But the buyer went straight to SNAD, and that was that. I'm not likely to placate someone who kicks me in the shins without so much as a, "Hello there!" first.

jt-libra · ‎09-06-2017

I'm happy this turned out well for you. Too often, we expect eBay to rule against us in favour of the buyer because we have all experienced that at one time(s) or another. As a result, many of us don't even bother calling since we don't want the frustration associated with that call.

So there is hope .....