Arizona Skies Meteorites
johnbirdsell at yahoo.com
Fri Sep 30 11:45:26 EDT 2005
Hi Mike and thanks for your post. This should be a
warning to EVERYONE! We had the same thing happen on
an expensive ebay purchase. The seller kept saying
that our order would arrive "soon"...of course it
never arrived. By the time we had decided to report
the seller to ebay and paypal, it was too late. Paypal
likes to pretend that they are the "safest" way to pay
for items, but you are out of luck if the item never
arrives or is not as described and you have waited
longer than the very limited time they allow you to
report a problem. This is why eveyone that uses paypal
should ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS choose their credit card
as a payment source. Paypal does not like it when you
do this and they try very hard to trick you into using
an e-check or a transfer from your bank account. Don't
fall for this. Always use your credit card as the
funding source! That way you can file a chargeback
dispute against the seller if you don't receive the
merchandise as described. Paypal won't tell you that
you can file a chargeback either as they don't want
you to know about it. In fact paypal will sometimes
actively try to dispute your chargeback as they tried
unsucessfully in our case.
Another VERY IMPORTANT warning regarding paypal is
that you should always remove ALL of your funds from
your account BEFORE you pay w/ a credit card.
Otherwise, paypal will use all of the funds in your
paypal account and only then after the funds are used,
charge the remaining balance due to your credit card.
This is what paypal does even when your specifically
indicate that you want the purchase to be funded by
your credit card. We feel that this is a very
misleading practice on the part of paypal, however if
you read the fine print of your paypal contract very
carefully, it states that they can do this.
The final note on this...Fortuntately, on our purchase
we used our credit card and only lost a small amount
of funds from our paypal account. We filed a dispute
w/ our credit card company, paypal tried to claim that
we had received the merchandise (which we had not),
and our credit card company credited our account for
the full amount of the purchase. The seller was
delisted from ebay (he did the same thing to 10-15
other buyers), and eventually declared chapter 11
bankruptcy!
Hope this story along with Mike Miller's serve as a
warning for everyone.
Cheers
-John
Thanks John these are some very good points that we need everyone to hear
about so they don't have to find out the hard way. So far everyone is saying
they want to know who it is and I have not had anyone say that I should not
reveal the details so I am going to do so. I had purchased ...Item # 6548785278...
on Aug 1st. I used Pay-Pal to pay for the item. They said it shipped
on Aug 5th. I was very patient because their feedback was very good. Today I
learned you must file a claim with E-bay within 60 days and with Pay-pal
within 45 days. This is something that I learned the hard way. I am bringing
this up here so maybe someone else will not have to learn the hard way. I
also feel that they avoided answering some of my questions until the 60 days
had passed. As an example I asked "what happens if I never get the
meteorite?" I never got an answer until now (after the 60 days has passed)
The answer is basically we sent the meteorite and you are out of luck.
As a seller I have refunded peoples money when they said they did not
receive the package, it happens so rarely that I have only had to refund a
few packages. Only 1 time I did not refund the money and that was only
because every time I asked for some information I felt like I was getting
the run around. The first question I asked was where do you want me to send
the refund to? Then when I got the address I check it against the address I
had sent the meteorite to and they did not match. So from then on I was very
suspicious and ended up not sending the refund.
I hope this helps someone else with filing their claim on time. Thanks
Mike Miller // E-Bay flattoprocks
Website // www.meteoritefinder.com
Check out the web site it is up and running!
Mike Miller 230 Greenway Rd. Kingman AZ 86401