Good morning,
as an italian power seller listing items on eBay.ca we would like some suggestions from expert canadian sellers and learn the way some cases should be approached to make our business easy and simple.
In Italy when a buyer open a return request for item not authentic eBay requires a prove of not authenticity, for example a declaration form the brand owner or from a brand authorized reseller.
It seems that on eBay.com or eBay.ca it works different and upon a return request for item not as described because it "does not seem authentic" the buyer is automatically and 100% protected by the customer service with the consequence that the seller must accept the request pay for the return shipment.
This is what happened to us a few days ago, briefly.
We sold on eBay.ca a branded item to an US based buyer and she started complaining the item was not authentic before we shipped ( the reason was that we had on sale too many items of the same size, typical of fake items).
Theorically this argument is logical (fake items never are sold out because you can produce them when you want) but it was not true not in this case because the listing had only 1 item on sale.
The truth is that we sell our items on 7 different worldwide eBay markets with a software syncronization of quantities so when she did an eBay search for that item the result showed all the 7 listings as we have then visible everywhere.
We reassured the buyer but we offered to cancel the purchase if she did not feel confidence regarding the item.
We adviced that we have a shipping policy to be respected so, without an answer from her, we needed to ship in 2 days because of the seller performances.
She did not answer so we shipped.
After receiving the item she asked to cancel the transaction.
We could not do that of course because the item had been delivered already so she had to open a return request (we offer 30 days returns)
She opened a return request for item not authentic saying that since the item is fake she did not want to pay for the return.
We contacted the customer service by mail asking for a suggestion to solve in the correct way this situation expecially because we can not accept to be connected to counterfeict items.
We did not write that we were on the right side, we simply asked what to do.
A rapresentative of the customer service e-mailed us saying that, after reviewing our account and the messages, we were absolutely right, that the item is absolutely authentic and that luckily eBay is a safe place were buyers are usually honest, so this was just an exception.
She suggested to ask the buyer to close the request and if she had not done that we should have had to ask eBay to solve the issue.
So we did, the buyer did not accept any other solution, she confirmed she did not want to pay anything and we had to scalate the issue to eBay.
What happened?
We received a mail from the customer service saying that since the buyer opened a return request for item SNAD "DOES NOT SEEM AUTHENTIC" we must pay the return shipment and accept the buyer request otherwise she will be refunded and we will loose both payment and item.
From my point of view the situation is so grotesque and absurd that it doesn't even deserve to get angry.
I would be glad to receive some answers from sellers just to learn how things work on eBay ca and eBay.com.
If it is a matter of different national laws or culture so that buyers are and must be protected in any circumstances.
If a buyer opens a return request for item "not as described" must we always accept it and pay for return shippings?
If so, it is not a problem but we will change our return policy in free returns so we can avoid issues like this.
We would like to know how things work to be prepared and adjust our policies and some expert seller based in Canada or United States could be useful to improve our business and behave in a correct way.
Sorry if we did not express in a correct english (it is not our mother language) and hoping in some suggestion.
Thank you
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