Ordered soemthing cheap (<£3) off ebay. Wrong item sent, so I used the ebay system to return it. Printed paid for address label and handed it in at local post office. I get an email to say it's been received and then I get a refund to my credit card. Next day the packet I sent in the post comes through my letter box marked "Gone Away".
So, they can't have received it.
eBay is littered with Chinese sellers who claim to send from within the UK.
I guess this one has used a dubious registered address, or a dodgy return address. They can check you've made an attempt to return the item from tracking info.
Sounds like the vendor cocked up the address details to me. Brian
Most use services like this, you can do it in another country as well to get around the we do not send outsidethe insert country here, problem. Brian
I think its more prosaic than this..... its called drop shipping.
Soemone in the UK has a access to a cheap chinese supplier/aggregator /marketplace/whoelsaler and often the electrical stuff on there is far cheaper than from the more established retailers.
The UK based person then advertises the same goods on eBay but with a price in between the chinese wholesaler and what the retail prices are.
Whoever wins the ebay auction then has their name and address passed to the wholesaler. The wholsaler then posts direct to the end customer.
The ebay seller pockets the difference between the wholesale cost and the ebay price sold.
The point here is that the ebay seller doesn't need to hold goods in stock at all and does not have to have a storage warehouse or have a business unit to pay business rates on, all it needs is a laptop with internat access, so can be done from home.
So when you retrun goods, it goes back to the UK address rather than all the way back to China.....
I actually found out who one of of the chinese marketplaces is and the price difference between them and UK retailers.....
Incidentally this particular marketplace will sell direct to anyone in any currency.
However, the downside is they will not accept PayPal, they want credit/debit cards and also usual warnings about counterfeits/fakes and dodgy batteries/electrical goods apply!
I've rejected many low-cost items that were not as described. I've never been asked to return the goods. If you were on a fraction of £3 profit wouldn't you regard the occasional write-off as an inevitable cost, but one to be minimised?
As they say in the world of accountancy - the first loss is always the cheapest.
PA
With many cheap items it often saves the vendor money to simply write it off, when the mistake is theirs.
Bulk postage from say China is obviously very cheap. The cost of returning an individual item very likely to exceed the retail price - let alone the out of pocket cost to them.
Yes, but they'd incurred the return charge when I took the packet to my post office.
I'd guess that's what's happening here. They could just refund if you complained, but then that encourages people to complain in the hope of getting a free item. So they ask you to 'return' it, and check the tracking says something was posted. They know that few people will actually return, because of the postage costs for cheap items.
They don't actually care what happens to the item after that. Possibly the address was once valid - when this started the addresses were often Chinese restaurants, nowadays they're more likely to be bonded warehouses near Heathrow. But now they're effectively outsourcing the landfilling of their trash products to the postal system, so they don't care what the address is.
Theo
THEY paid for the postage on the ebay return label.
Do you know what it actually was? Could it just have been local postage to a fictitious address to satisfy Ebay requirements?
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