e-bay refusing to enforce a sale

Hi all,

Perhaps this has been covered already. My wife recently successfully bid on two items on e-bay, before bidding, she contacted the seller to ask if she would get a reduction in p&p charges should she bbe successful on both items. The seller stated that she would reduce the costs were this the case.

After the auction ended, my wife contacted the seller to arrange payment and was informed that one item was sold too cheaply and that the seller had meant to put a reserve price on (no mention was made of this when my wife contacted her re p&p costs). The net result was that the seller refused to sell both items.

My wife contacted e-bay and after numerous generic e-mails, finally recieved correspondance to say that the seller would be investigated - end of story.

My wife is now quite upset as she really wanted the two items and had been searching for them for quite a while. As far as i am concerned, my wife had a valid and enforceable contract and should be entitled to the goods but as the seller is in England and the money involved is relatively small, initiating legal action is probably not really on the cards.

It seems to me that e-bay should have some responsibility here for enforcing the contract. I assume that they took their fees from the seller, and as such it occurred to me that there may be some form of corollary contract arising between my wife and e-bay as the auctioneers. I do remember a case a number of years back where an auctioneer of plant equipment refused to sell items which had no reserve and had to pay the winning bidder the full amount of the bid as compensation.

if anyone has come accross a similar situation, i would be grateful for any advice

Cheers

The best you can hope for is for the seller to agree to send them item at the amout bid by your wife. Depending on the type of seller they are -eg powerseller ebay can give them an unpaid item strike against them and remove the powerseller status etc

Your wife can also leave neg feedback which will affect the sellers reputation but apart from that not much that can be done unfortunately.

Last year I bought put a winning bid on an iPhone from a Belgian seller, after a couple of weeks messing around with problems shipping it he said he wasn't sending it and would give a refund, got my money back and bought another one for more money.

You can't do anything about it unfortunatly, no one can 'make' the seller send the items. File a NPS Dispute, Non Performing Seller, leave negative feedback, give 1 stars all the way and move on. You can do no more.

Unfortunately there are cowboys on ebay too. I had a problem last year where I received damaged goods (that were obviously damaged before they were shipped)
I got no satisfaction from the seller, ebay or paypal.
Needless to say i've never used ebay since

if your wife really wants the items so badly, would she not just offer to pay the reserve price??

This is not to discount all good experience of thousands satisfied e-bay customers, but if you were to look here [broken link removed]
it would appear that your wife's experience is also quite common thing on e-bay. It's a shame ebay doesn't do much (can they do more?) about dishonest users...



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