Buyer sued for eBay feedback
Insanity knows no limits. Neither, it seems, do the feelings of a hurt eBay seller.
Chris Read, a 42-year-old English chap, bought a Samsung 700V phone from Joel Jones on eBay.
"I was told the phone was in good condition, but there were scratches all over it, a big chip out of the side and it was a different phone. I paid for a Samsung F700 and got a Samsung F700V," Read told the Daily Telegraph.
He returned the phone and got a full refund, but, thinking he might help other less-than-witting purchasers, he left a comment on eBay's feedback link.
Please read how willfully nasty were Read's words: "Item was scratched, chipped and not the model advertised on Mr Jones' eBay account." Um, and that appears to have been it.
Jones, on reading this deep indictment of his exemplary business practices sent an e-mail to Read, threatening to sue for libel. The gist of his e-mail seems to have been that Read's highly emotional invective had adversely affected his business.
And so, my friends, we are going to the place where judges still wear toupees.
Read is determined not to have his eyes scratched out by a scratchy phone seller: "I thought that was why the feedback service was there. It's not like I wrote anything malicious or nasty."
Jones, however, has a very interesting argument, one that many a marketer of underperforming gadgetry will surely consider for their next campaign: "If you don't like the goods, then you get a full refund. Surely that is great customer service and deserves positive feedback."
He claims that, because of Read's hideously honest comment, eBay has sent him down toward the nether hell of its listings pages.
One can't help wondering, however, whether Jones might put his legal mallet away and instead put his own comment next to Read's feedback.
Perhaps he could explain that his two-legged dog, Horatio, had inadvertently scratched the phone as it was being packed. Or that the chips were caused by his moody schizophrenic budgerigar, Sarah.
Surely Jones is seeking sympathy rather than justice. Because even if he somehow persuaded a court that he was right (which would seem a little unlikely), he will always be known as the scratchy phone seller who sues his customers.
Mr. Jones, can you imagine what the comments on the eBay feedback page will look like after the court case? Surely this was just one piece of feedback. And am I right in thinking that everything Mr. Read wrote was, well, true? So how was it, as your suit maintains, "unfair, unreasonable, and damaging?"
Many eBay sellers get hundreds, even thousands of comments. Did you not get any positive ones? Is that it? Do you just need a little love?
Don't they have a Judge Judy in the U.K.?
Chris Matyszczyk is an award-winning creative director who advises major corporations on content creation and marketing. He brings an irreverent, sarcastic, and sometimes ironic voice to the tech world. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. 
So my recent experience was just a concern about shipping charges on an item I purchased. My Neutral Rating (not negative mind you) comment:
"Understand S&H fee. Handling valid-but actual USPS $5 paid $33 bought 10 units"
He was more than a little miffed. In fact sending me a vitriole filled email about my ungrateful nature. LOL Oh yeah and he informed me I was now on his "Don't Sell to" list. A crushing blow to my commerce life. But honestly this seller has a near perfect rating. I am his only neutral rating and he has one negative from over a year ago. So he has another year to go now to get back to perfect. But somehow I will live through the shame.
Shipping isn't cheap. At least if you want it done right so that what you buy arrives in one piece. This is not to say that some on eBay don't gouge you, but people need to keep in mind the true costs of shipping and not just their narrow idea that is it simply what the shipper charges to ship it the cheapest way possible.
Companies like eBay and PayPal don't help matters when they require you to do certain things in order to be protected by the protection guarantees. This is the big reason I don't deal with eBay or PayPal it just costs way too much. Well, that and eBay is now more like a Latino flea market than a place for people to sell used items they don't want. It went too commercial with too much of the same cr@p.
Robert
Thank you for telling your story.
Chris
GET A LIFE!
Yours is an extraordinary story. Did you HAVE to fill out the retraction form? Why did you HAVE to fill it out? What would have happened if you refused? Has the concept of the customer always being right, or at least some of the time, disappeared?
Did the fax actually come from eBay?
Chris
Recently, I bought an iPod on eBay. The fellow already left me feedback. I went ahead, at the delivery of the item, discovered the iPod is defective, and I left him negative feedback, as did somebody else for another reason. Before I did, I sent this idiot a good number of e-mails asking him to help me. First, he tells me it's for "Mac", which is useless, as long iTunes is on any PC (I use the 1979 definition of PC, and not the incorrect lumping of all Winblows computers into a model of an IBM computer) if working, the iPod will be seen by the application. Also, it didn't matter if it was Mac of Winblows, as the 20+ PCs I use (15 Macs, 5 Winblows) the iPod wouldn't work. He e-mails me back and tells me to get the "drivers" for the iPod. Except there are no iPod "drivers", because iTunes has the "drivers" so to speak. After I told him to get a better testing process and that he can keep my money even though he sent me a defective iPod, he sent me an insulting e-mail as a response. It's that response that got him the negative feedback. I pointed out to him two things: (1) The date my account was opened on eBay, and (2) My 400+ positive rating. His rating was under ten at the time.
Bottomline: He should've been a better seller to work-out the defective problems of the products and should've thorough tested the product.
Sellers can NO LONGER GIVE NEGATIVE FEEDBACK ON BUYERS.
I put that in caps so it stands out. Buyers can give all the negative feedback they want on sellers, but sellers cannot do anything in the other direction - no matter how flaky or fraudulent auction winners are. Thus it's not particularly surprising that this type of action resulted from that strange policy move.
Regardless how justified or unjustified the seller was in the example cited in your article - you have to admit that's a rather bizarre policy.
I've been using ebay since before it was called ebay. I have many times lamented how they have become increasingly hostile to the interests of bidders/buyers. There must be many like me for them to have inexplicably created that assymetrical feedback policy.
But there needs to be much more transparency in the process overall. eBay has been increasingly clamping-down on that over the years. You cannot even see the user ID's of bidders on most items with values >$100 ($50?) now - eBay claims this is for "security" or "anti-fraud" reasons, but the reality is that this sort of loss of transparency at ebay has been progressive for years now.
They have moved recently to create a better support infrastructure - ie setting up phone support banks. But that move was years overdue - it has long been absurd that it was nearly impossible to even discover any sort of contact info whatsoever for either Paypal or eBay - forcing you to jump through byzantine mazes of web-form-based nonsense - and then wait weeks or months - in an effort to avail yourself of promised "transaction guarantees" and so forth. Well it seems that falling profits over there has finally woken them up a little.
To add insult to injury, their dealings with craigslist (after their sneaky "backdoor" takeover of certain craigslist shares) have been despicable. I only wish there were a viable alternative right now.
I also agree with some other comments; if you don't like the way eBay works, don't use it.
- by MorningBit October 24, 2008 8:09 AM PDT
- Fun article, but your title is not what happened. You said he threatened to sue, not that he DID sue.
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