| April 27, 2009 |
 Reports of eBay's New Dispute Process in Action |
| By: Ina Steiner |
| Mon Apr 27 2009 027:21:28 |
Reports are surfacing from buyers who have encountered eBay's new dispute resolution process announced on April 14, 2009. eBay said the process will apply to cases where buyers claim an item was not received or the item they received was different than described in the listing.
The process is initiated when a buyer goes to file a PayPal claim against a seller. Buyers are exposed to a screen that gives them a phone number to call (one buyer called it a pop up, another a banner, and another called it a redirect. Tamebay has a screenshot of what one buyer saw. Shown above is a screenshot that another buyer posted on a discussion board after logging in to PayPal.)
A buyer who described his experience with the new dispute process in a thread on an industry discussion board on April 15th said was generally satisfied with the experience but had two major complaints. There was no documentation showing that the transaction was refunded in PayPal, he said, and "eBay wants me to keep the money and the item. That's just wrong." A participant on the discussion board thread wrote that they believed Bay was attempting to replicate Amazon's A-Z guarantee program.
In another case described by an AuctionBytes reader in an email, he had purchased an item in which the seller was unresponsive about when he would ship the item. When he clicked on a link to file a complaint, this is what happened:
"I clicked what I thought to be the Paypal link and a "Call Ebay first at this 800 number" window popped up. A very nice young man listened to my story and took notes. After hearing it, I asked what is next. He said, "Ebay is going to refund your payment". They then suggested I not have any dialog with the seller. They promptly did refund.
"Later that night the seller wrote and said he was prepared for 2 day expedited shipping. I wrote back that the deal was off as Ebay was refunding my payment. My money arrived in my Paypal account and the seller is no longer registered."
When going through the dispute process, both buyers said they explained the situation to an eBay representative by phone and were immediately refunded, and the sellers suspended.
Since the eBay reps are looking at these cases and making an immediate decision in the buyer's favor, it makes sense for sellers to be more diligent not only about responding to buyer complaints - but about documenting them through the eBay system so the reps can see they've responded to buyers.
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