bullybones

We now interrupt our regularly-scheduled programming to bring you a cautionary tale about your twin buddies eBay and Pay“Pal”, and how they turn on you when the going gets rough. Very much like the American government, they behave in an extremely refined and civilized manner, but God help you if you haven’t read the fine print. My manner is not quite so refined, and this post may contain some strong language that might be offensive to our younger or more effete readers. Be forewarned.

Our story begins when I was foolish enough to purchase a 4-gigabyte no-name mp3 player on eBay from a merchant in Hong Kong. The merchant had dozens of identical mp3 players listed on eBay, and his seller feedback was 100% positive at the time I made my purchase, with 98 sales to his credit at that time. His ad oozed with unctuous concern for my customer satisfaction. And best of all, the ad proclaimed that I was protected by PayPal Buyer Protection, free coverage up to 500 British pounds! When I won the item for a price of 26 British pounds (a little over $52.00), I was pretty happy. Even when the item took almost a month to arrive, my enthusiasm was relatively undiminished.

Then I opened the package. All of the parts were there. But the manual, while technically in English, was utterly incomprehensible. Here’s an example from one of the introductory bullet points:

• Break to order to sow continuously: Broadcast the stop hour remembers to broadcast the position, the some song orders to a time while broadcast the some catalogue up is shut down, switch on after then park the last time of time order, Play after order to start broadcast from now on.

As you can see, I was left very much on my own.

Through experimentation, I managed to input a number of songs into the mp3 player, arranged in folders. I figured out how to turn the unit on, and get it to play a song. But I learned after much trial and error that I couldn’t maneuver around through the folders. The only thing I could do was to go forward to the next song or backward to the previous song. Not terribly helpful if you have 1,000 songs and you want to skip around.

It got worse. I discovered that the battery would hold a charge for only an hour or two, in part because the lighted screen stayed lit all the time. I learned that the plug-in charger wouldn’t charge the battery at all, so I had to rely on the USB cord to charge the battery. There were other problems too numerous to mention. Some were merely annoying but a couple, like the battery not holding a charge, were deal-killers.

In short, the mp3 player wasn’t worth a damn. I contacted the seller by e-mail, as eBay advised me to do, and waited several days. No reply. I e-mailed him again, more adamant this time. The second time I got an automatic reply from him saying that he was swamped with orders and that he was doing the best he could to get caught up. So I waited a few more days before deciding, as any good consumer would, to invoke the eBay Standard Purchase Protection Program. I filed a complaint, as instructed, and was required to wait 10 days for the seller to respond before escalating the complaint to a claim. By this time the seller was no longer a registered eBay user, and his approval rating had fallen from 100% to 84.3% in a little over a month, with 407 sales. But I still had to wait the 10 days to allow eBay’s process to work.

When I went back after 10 days to escalate my complaint to a claim, I discovered two things. First, IF my claim was found to be valid, eBay would charge me a 15-pound “processing fee” – around $30.00. This represented about 60% of the amount I had spent for the mp3 player, and meant that I would get only about $22.00 back on my $52.00 purchase. Second, I discovered in the fine print the merest suggestion that this eBay Standard Purchase Protection Program was DIFFERENT FROM and INFERIOR TO the PayPal Buyer Protection Plan, which would pay a successful claimant up to 500 pounds sterling and charged no processing fee. So I headed over to the PayPal web site, and spent a couple of hours printing out pages and reading all the fine print. Let me emphasize that on the eBay web site, where I had purchased the product, there was only the slightest and most obscure mention of a PayPal Buyer Protection Plan that might be different from the eBay plan.

Come to find out, the PayPal plan, while much more generous that the eBay plan, had a “window” of only 45 days from the date of purchase in which to file your claim. I e-mailed the folks at PayPal and explained my situation. If it had been a telephone conversation, it might have gone something like this:

Me: Hi, PayPal. I bought this mp3 player from a merchant in Hong Kong, and it doesn’t work. I’d like to get my money back.

PayPal: Has it been more than 45 days since you made the purchase, sir?

Me: Yes, but the merchant was in HONG KONG, and it took…

PayPal: Gee, we’re terribly sorry.

Me: …a MONTH for the item to even arrive!

PayPal: Has it been more than 45 days since you made the purchase, sir?

Me: Yes, but as I said…

PayPal: Then we can’t help you, sir.

Me: Look. Not only did it take a month to arrive, but then I had to check the item out to see whether it worked or not, and when I found out it was a lemon, I e-mailed the merchant just like your web site says to do, and waited for his response.

PayPal: Has it been more than 45 days since you made the purchase, sir?

Me: YES, dammit! But I’m telling you…

PayPal: Then I’m afraid you’re shit out of luck, sir.

Me: God damn it! I wasted ten fucking days fucking around with eBay’s buyer protection plan, before discovering that it’s different from yours! It’s not at all clear that they’re two separate plans.

PayPal: Our plan is clearly spelled out on our web site, sir.

Me: But I was on eBay’s fucking web site! And PayPal is OWNED by eBay! Why don’t they make it clear that there are two separate plans??

PayPal: I don’t know sir. But we can’t help you. (And here I quote PayPal’s service rep verbatim: “With millions of users, PayPal cannot make exceptions of this policy on an individual basis, as doing so would be an unfair business practice.”)

Me: Jesus fucking Christ! It’s not an unfair business practice! It’s GOOD BUSINESS!!!!

So I was thrown back on the eBay Standard Purchase Protection Program, with its $30.00 “processing fee”. But it looks like I’m not going to get anything from them, either. They say they’re going to require, among other things, a “Letter of Authenticity or Appraisal” from an “independent authenticator’s physical inspection”, presumably to verify my claim that my mp3 player doesn’t work right. I’ll probably have to ship my mp3 player to this “independent authenticator” at my own expense, which I will refuse to do. Rather than accept a refund of about $10.00 on a $52.00 item, IF the “independent authenticator” finds that my claim has validity, I’ll keep the mp3 player for use as a very large and expensive 4-gigabyte flash drive. It does hold data, presumably even without a functioning battery.

Meanwhile that prick in Hong Kong is probably already back on eBay, selling more defective goods under another name.

To add insult to injury, I attempted to withdraw the $7.95 balance that I had sitting in PayPal, drawing interest income FOR THOSE BASTARDS. (Think about it; MILLIONS of people have cash balances sitting in their PayPal accounts, paying income TO PAYPAL.) Come to find out, the MINIMUM I can withdraw from my OWN PayPal account is $10.00. So I had to DEPOSIT $2.05 INTO my PayPal account, just so that I can withdraw the total amount next week sometime.

I post this as my only recourse against eBay and PayPal. I post to let you know in no uncertain terms that PayPal is emphatically NOT your “pal”.

I hope that sufficient numbers of you who read this will cease to patronize eBay and PayPal, at least enough to cost them far more than the measly $52.00 that they should have cheerfully paid me.

If you can’t live without eBay, then I hope that you won’t purchase anything from overseas. And if you can’t live without the latest toy from Hong Kong, I hope I’ve helped you to become more aware of what will happen to you if a purchase goes awry, and you haven’t read all the fine print. Or even if you HAVE read all the fine print. As usual, caveat emptor. Let the buyer beware.

Me? I don’t need eBay or PayPal that badly. I’m shopping locally from now on. Say what you will about Wal-Mart, they’ll generally bend their rules enough to let you return a defective item and get your money back. They seem to understand the importance of a satisfied customer, whose word of mouth can make them or break them in the long run.

EDIT: I learned from one of my readers that there’s an actual web site called paypalsucks.com . While any disgruntled person can throw up a web site, it appears that quite a bit of work has gone into this one, and that a significant number of people have had far worse problems with PayPal than I have. There’s also a web site called ebaysucks.com , but it’s a little more dated and less helpful. Anyway, once again, caveat emptor.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 5:15 am and is filed under Consumer News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.