It’s a buyers’ market. I’ve been on eBay for almost 20 years and I’ve never sold a thing. I’m only a buyer and as time has gone on for protecting buyers, I’ve bought more and more on eBay. It’s come to the point, where if I see something on Amazon by a private party, I will look on eBay to try and get it first. The buyer protection is better. Just the other day I bought something from an eBay seller on eBay and not their website, because on eBay they took Paypal, on their website I had to enter in my CC info. :)
I’ve bought thousands of dollars’ worth of stuff on eBay that I never would have if they didn’t have the money back guarantee. I’ve bought over $20,000 worth of stuff on eBay this year and I would never even touched it if they didn’t have the eBay money back guarantee. I had several items that were worth $5,000, $4,000, and $3,500. With no guarantee it would be a cold day in hell before I’d shell that kind of money out to buy those items.
From a buyer’s perspective, sellers a pretty scammy too. I recently bought a video card from someone and they said in the listing they put it in the computer and it came up in Windows device manager so it’s “working”. When I got it, for sure it came up in device manger, just it didn’t work when you went to play your game. One of the 3D chips were bad on it and until you go to use it, it won’t work. The seller argued with me about it not working and how I must be doing something wrong, blah blah blah blah. It really didn’t work and they were either trying to scam me or were just incompetent. They wouldn’t do a return, eBay forced them to do a return and I sent it back and I got a refund. I bought the same exact card from someone else and that one worked perfectly fine, so I know it was me.
The eBay money back guarantee does make sellers honest too, if the thing your selling doesn’t work, just say so, don’t try to pawn it off on me.
If you think selling on eBay is hard, try being a store where everyone brings crap back for a any reason at all. Look at Best Buy, Target, Wal-Mart, Kohl’s, or any other store and what their returns must be like. You can pretty much return anything to those stores for any reason. I remember when I was a kid it was almost impossible to take things back and when Best Buy had that 30 day return policy it was amazing, and a game changer, “So you mean to tell me, if I don’t actually like this, I can take it back?” You know often I’m in the middle of buying something and I’m unsure if I will like it and what brings me over the edge is, “Well… they do have that 30 day policy, so If I really do hate it I can take it back” and 99.9999999% of the time I end up keeping it. You know how often I have my mouse button over the “Buy it now” on eBay and I’m not sure if I should really trust the seller and then I think, “Well, they do have the eBay money back guarantee, if it doesn’t work, I’ll just take it back”. – Bring, I hit buy it now, and after buying $20k worth of stuff this year, I had $300 in bad purchase which I got my money back for.
Point is, is that eBay and all of those other stores would have lost thousands and thousands of dollars in purchases from alone if they didn’t have these policies. The amount of stuff I buy and never return is worth the policy. I’ve bought over $20,000 worth of stuff on eBay and I’ve had to use the money back guarantee twice this year and it totaled $300.
I’m the guy eBay makes the policy after. They know I will stop buying if it isn’t the way it is and I buy far, far, far, more than I ever return, and I only return things don’t work.