Hannah Banana Blog and Forum

I used to regularly use Ebay to buy and sell my stuff, up until when I sold some of Neil’s kitchen equipment from his cafe. Hopefully once you have read this story you will see some sense and use another auction site that doesn’t require every seller to have paypal as one of their payment options. I recommend Ebid (there’s several payment options, and you get to choose which). 

I sold a Kenwood food mixer for £122 and advertised it as pick up only. The winning bidder (ooglewoogle – if you come across this buyer, steer clear) contacted me to ask if they could arrange and pay for a courier to come and collect it. I said yes. So they arranged for parcelforce to come and collect it and just my luck, they had broken the food mixer during transit. I had wrapped this mixer in bubble wrap, cardboard etc but if the courier throws their parcels around (I knew someone who used to work there and witnessed them doing it), then there’s no hope in hell that the buyer was going to receive it undamaged! If only I had known that beforehand, I would have written FRAGILE over every little square inch of the box. The buyer however decided to blame the damage on me, claiming i’d sold them a faulty item (despite the fact that I had advertised it as PICK UP ONLY – am I really going to hand over a mixer that has clearly been knocked out of joint? – and 100% positive feedback). So a dispute was made under paypal and they came to the conclusion that I had to give the buyer a full refund once they had returned the broken mixer. So I am left with a broken mixer and I am having to pay £122 for it?!  

I contacted paypal several times about this and they told me to reopen the case all I had to do was get a police witness statement simply confirming that the food mixer was broken. NO police station in Scotland would give me this statement – they all claimed that they have nothing to do with paypal and they shouldn’t have asked me to get this statement from them in the first place. After about a month I finally managed to get one from someone who knew a policeman. I faxed this to paypal, yet they did nothing with this information and still claimed that I was due them money (they gave the buyer a full refund, so now I owe them the £122).  

I have now withdrawn my bank details from paypal so that they cannot take any money from me. And I can no longer phone to get in touch with them about the whole situation as when you phone paypal, they require you to type in the first few digits of the bank card you have registered with them before you can speak to anyone – so in order to talk to somebody, I would have to re-register my card, only for them to snap up the £122! Nice customer service there. And I have tried emailing but I keep getting the same stupid automated response – “send us the item in its original condition (how can i do that? IT’S BROKEN) and we will give you a full refund”. 

And now I have the debt collectors phoning me every week telling me that I am due paypal money. Lovely. The moral of the story is, don’t use paypal if you’re planning to sell, you will have no hope in hell if a dispute is opened up. Even better, don’t use Ebay. There’s plenty of other auction sites out there that will not do you over, and offer better protection for the sellers. 

If you are trying to get a police witness statement – don’t waste your time travelling to all the police stations you can find. This may be a paypal policy within the US but it certainly isn’t in the UK. You will not have a chance of getting one, unless you happen to know somebody that works in that area. Paypal know this very well but they will insist that you get one and if you don’t, the case will be closed in the buyer’s favour.

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