strangereality145

I'm an irregular user of eBay - a dozen or so items bought over the space of a couple of years, always without a problem. Recently, however, I had a problem: a seller withdrew the PayPal facility after the auction had closed, and asked me to pay by direct bank transfer instead.

I smelled trouble and declined to do so, as was my right. After some to-ing and fro-ing (the seller stubbornly clinging onto the vain hope that I'd simply cave in), the transaction was mutually cancelled.

All of this took a week of daily e-mails ping-ponging between us, with me becoming increasingly firm and no-nonsense, and the seller becoming increasingly wheedling and sulky.

But I'm honest, you can trust me, was the gist of the seller's position.

I do not want to pay by bank transfer and I am not obliged to: please cancel the transaction, was the gist of mine.

I seriously worried that this little tiff would impact upon my so-far 100% feedback. But in the end it all ended well. I only mention it here because at one point I was Googling for eBay horror stories, seeking information about precedents. It's common for disgruntled consumers of any stripe, in any field, to take their grievances online, usually under the banner of X is shit, with X being whatever-it-is they're disgruntled about.

So I Googled eBay is shit, just to find the largest concentration of gripes and groans in the quickest possible fashion. I did find many instances of sellers yanking the PayPal rug from under buyers' feet at the last moment. Sometimes - not often, but sometimes - it was indeed a ruse as part of a larger scam; but most often it was entirely innocuous, and the buyer was entitled to insist upon mutual withdrawal.

So that eased my mind. And whilst Googling, I saw this sponsored link, which amused me: