I'm thinking of buying something that is a bit expensive on eBay, and the eBay buyer protection program is making me lean towards more in favor of just diving right in. However, I thought I would run this by you guys first to see if anyone here has already had previous experience with this process, and if so, I'd like to hear what are your thoughts on it. From what I understand ebay is willing to insure your purchase up to $250 regardless if you use Paypal or a bank deposit, so long as you could prove your payment. I'd just like to hear what I can expect if ever I did have to resort to it. Any advice or tips when depending on ebay's buyer protection program?
I have not ever bought anything to the tune of that amount from ebay, but I have bought electronics from the website before. One product that I purchased was a cell/mobile phone. when it arrived everything was great, until I discovered that the wifi feature wasn't working. All of my other devices that were capable of wifi were working and the phone wasn't. So I contacted the seller and I arranged to send the phone back. We did this , and she tried to get out of paying the return postage, but she did pretty quickly after I reminded her about it. So I got all of my money back. I would have opened up a dispute but it wasn't necessary. I have been using the site ever since, and it is great with great prices.
I haven't made any big purchases myself on ebay, but I know a few people who do regularly and it seems the customer service has been pretty on point for them- for a lot of sellers, just knowing there is buyer protection (and in a lot of cases them actually having a store established and wanting a decent rating overall) is enough to have them doing what they're supposed to, and in instances where it is not, it seems the buy protection program/their customer service in general handles it pretty well. I've never had a problem with what I have done on eBay.
Also, there are many sellers on there who know how fragile their reputation is. So they do what they can - sometimes even bending over backwards to grant their buyers the best kind of customer service that they can. This includes fast delivers, and personal contact - usually over the phone or email - in order to make certain that their seller rating either improves or stays the same. As long as it doesn't decrease, they are happy. I like this because it gives the seller most of the control.
