Needs A Return For A Faulty Attitude

Canada, Impossible Demands, Jerk, Online | Right | January 17, 2020

(I am selling my entry-level DSLR on eBay. Only twenty years old and pretty new to the whole camera world, I don’t notice some dust on the sensor and a few worn spots on the camera body itself, so I don’t include them in the listing. My bad, obviously. When the seller points that out, I agree to accept the camera back and issue a refund. The following conversation takes place over email.)

Me: “Once you return the camera to me, I will refund you the original price — camera + shipping — so [total]. I am sorry it did not work out for you.”

Buyer: “I paid you in advance in good faith for an item that did not arrive in the way that it should — i.e., as listed, and clean. Because of this, I have to return it to you, and go back on eBay and find another camera to bid on. You wrote in your last message, ‘Once you return the camera to me, I will refund you.’ That doesn’t make any sense. I had to trust you when I gave you [total] on winning the auction, and I did, and you were honest and sent the camera. As a matter of simple courtesy, I think is entirely reasonable for me to expect reciprocity in trust, which is to say, to have you refund me before I put it in the mail.”

Me: “As for refunds, standard business practice is to refund your money once I have received the camera back from you. Thank you.”

(The buyer is very argumentative — the whole conversation involves long, drawn-out messages like that — and we go back and forth quite a bit before he agrees to finally send my camera back to me. After I receive the camera back and I think the whole thing is all over, I get this gem:)

Buyer: “I hope that you nor any of the women in your family are able to bear children and bring any more people like you into this world.”

(I reported the conversation to eBay. Not sure if anything was done about it, but I’m pretty sure I could hear the woman on the other end softly chuckling when she read the whole transcript. I mean, seriously?! Who thinks they get a refund BEFORE sending back the item they want to return?)

This story is part of our crazy-online-shoppers roundup!