Shopping on eBay is not the same as the classified adds in the local paper?
I’d like to see the local rag offer the same payment, delivery and other performance under takings eBay offer for all the products and services advertised in their back pages.
The alternative is eBay need to withdraw from all support for the products and business using it’s marketing platform. It would lay bare the business model.
Is Amazon any different in how some of it’s products are offered?
I’ve used Amazon, a few times going as far back as when it was just a bookshop. I’d rather go direct to a business with an Australian outlet or proven business OS than chance eBay. Perhaps that’s too narrow a vision, but with doubtful support under ACL why take the risk in wasted time and effort?
Indeed, often the goods arrive from Australian sellers in quite obvious eBay satchels, then eBay users can join eBayplus to gain extra membership benefits from eBay in which they offer “Unlock our(my highlighting) Best Savings with eBay Plus”…their best savings not the “sellers” best savings and $5 off per month, Exclusive Sales…sounds just like a shop to me.
It is similar to accommodation booking websites that offer discounts, exclusive offers and also have all booking information in the accommodation booking platform website name. They also can take payment for services covered by a booking as well.
These booking websites don’t own the accommodation but are only a booking platform that charge fees to accommodation providers. It would be great if they had greater responsibilities as they could pay insurances, rates, electricity, water, labour etc costs as well.
The booking website modus operandi is very similar to eBay, the only major difference is the consumer products/services provided.
Accommodation booking websites are akin to travel agents, like eBay to a newspaper classifieds/advertisements. They can organise payment where newspapers left transactions between the seller and buyer.
Place cash equal to 10% of the value of every purchase made on eBay in a jar at the same time as the online order is placed. If the product later fails, hope the accumulated insurance jar covers a replacement.
The saving buying on eBay might need to be more than 10% before it’s worth the risk is one way to look at each prospective purchase. Alternately Lady Luck might shine and at the end of each year the jar can pay for … all thanks to eBay. And think of all that wasted time and and stress saved by not chasing dodgy sellers who are untouchable at day 61?
My understanding is that once you provide feedback after receiving your item (you can only offer feedback for a short time) eBay does not allow you to change or update that feedback. So you can never offer long term feedback on eBay items, either first up or by modifying an earlier response.
Reputation score doesn’t help much either for warranty claims. 100% of buyers could have a failure 3 months after buying and the vendor score would still be 99.8% because there is no means of giving the necessary negative feedback. IME eBay do a very poor job of disciplining bad vendors. (Though to be fair I’ve found most sellers are good or very good).
But it IS eBay’s fault that they don’t penalise vendors who do not meet their (the seller’s) own stated warranties. They don’t even allow burnt buyers to warn others. There is no negative consequence to sellers who blatantly lie about their warranty.
Unfortunately eBay isn’t a regulator and can’t make sellers honour a warranty…or have any way to determine is a seller didn’t honour a warranty or it was a frivolous/vexatious customer/competitor.
If enough sellers have issues within the first 30 days, they do take action. We had an issue with an overseas seller that claimed that the goods had been posted. When we used the buyer protection of eBay/PayPal, we were notified that we were not the only recent buyer who had experienced the same issue. I went to post feedback on the seller and the seller had disappeared from eBay. I can either assume that the account was blocked/removed by eBay or the seller closed it down as they were going to be blocked/removed.
This applies to buying anything online, whether it is from eBay or direct from a seller’s website. If one buys something from a sellers website or from clickbait advertising on social media platforms, often than not that have no protection. eBay offers a limited 30 day buyer protection which they have no obligation to do…potentially to filter out the scam/sham sellers within the 30 day period. If they didn’t do this, it is likely that eBay would fall over as it would become rampant with scam/sham sellers (like many who advertise on those platforms with no protections such as Facebook or through Google advertisements).
eBay doesn’t have to be a regulator. As you point out, eBay does make some effort to enforce good behaviour by sellers in many respects. It also allows feedback by consumers to indicate poor seller performance. My point, and the point of the OP, is that eBay provide no means of providing the same penalty or feedback re sellers who don’t support their stated warranty.
To be very clear, if a seller promises that a device works on 240V and that they provide a 12 month warranty, eBay will penalise the seller if the device turns out to be110V only, and the consumer can also provide negative feedback. If the device does work at 240V for 3 months then fails, eBay does not allow negative feedback and will not take any action against the seller if they don’t honour the warranty. There is no good reason for this difference.
I would caution everyone to check the small print of any warranty on goods bought from overseas. It may be for example that there are differences in what is covered or the length of time the warranty stands and even if it is valid in Australia at all.
Fitbit is a great example of where the terms and conditions are far less in Australia than for the exact same product sold in the USA or UK for example.
That would make an interesting evidentiary statement in a letter of complaint per the ACL to justify why a product should be repair/replaced post its local ‘factory warranty’. A ‘factory warranty’ is usually what they aim to get away with, not what they have to deliver on. Unfortunately consumers often need to fight for the latter.
It could be that the consumer protections in Australia are different to that in the USA/UK. We are fortunate to have the relatively strong ACL. With the ACL, businesses can write T&Cs to remove their obligations (unlike other countries) which makes any Australian product/service T&Cs simpler and potentially shorter.
As well as putting the onus on the consumer to bring them up to ‘par’ in many cases. In this case the comparison was referenced to be a shorter warranty here than there, not one with more or fewer T&C.
While the opening paragraph is a general statement about warranty length…I took it the second sentence as T&Cs being not as long or different to Australia rather than length of warranty.
Many companies have a one page Australian T&Cs, where the non-Australian ones are quite lengthy.
*Edit: For US customers, the standard warranty is 1 year (increased to 2 years if one purchases the Fitbit Protection Plan (FPP)), while Australia the manufacturer warranty is 1 year, but may be greater under the ACL. If a FitBit is bought in the EEA and shipped to Australia, it would come with a 2 year warranty from the date of purchase.
I complained about a product, by email - seller said beyond the 30 day returns policy. It is a moisturiser, which smells so bad it could be off. Put criticism on website, which they may not publish.
