eBay Battery Seller Warning

[BruisedQuasar]

First, I wish to express my view that it is high time that consumer activists went to war against eBay. Ever try to contact eBay about suspicious seller conduct, or contact eBay security about apparant fraud?

Just try contacting a live person at ebay or try posting a warning or complaint about eBay inaction anywhere on its public forums. eBay employs an old government bureaucratic technique known as 'Red Tape.'

The purpose of Red Tape, by the way, is to neutralize citizens by cattle-guide like restricting their movement down time consuming, narrow paths that lead nowhere. The eBay version is this: After you type and post and press 'send', only then do you learn you cannot post at that spot. Eventually, after a lot of energy and time investment the mere citizen finds himself back where he started. This is known as "spinning your wheels" down the red tape highway. After a lot of time investment and what you thought was movement, you discover you are just running in place. This is known among career bureaucrats as "soldiering," after the treading water method, where you stay afloat with your nose above water but you never go anywhere.

After considerable personal research into a big battery seller based in Hong Kong titled "SINO_Battery", I am very concerned. I warn people to NOT buy from him without studying his feed back. Here is what you will discover>>
A lot of negative feedback for a seller with as high a positive feedback percentage as he seems to have. The feedback he has forms a clear pattern. I recently emailed several of these unhappy buyers and all of them responded within 48 hours. I find if issues get resolved, few or no buyers respond to a person asking them what they think of a seller. EVERY single buyer who posted a negative responded to my post! And they were global, Italy, Greece, etc.

Oh, this one is near comic. Sino deals with negative email and questions asking for clarity with TV-like stereotype broken English. This way his response makes no sense and thus does not answer direct questions. He also simply ignores expressed concerns about his honesty and replies with self-promotion slogans. His reponses to email read like a late night "you too can become rich, easily" TV infomercial from hell. He should take up spinning for a political party! Who knows? Hong Kong is Communist Chinese territory now. Maybe he is a former Communist Party hack!

I contacted eBay several weeks ago about suspicious activity of Sino_Battery. I even named his main partner (or huge customer?) Amato Battery. I suspect Sino hacks eBay. Why? After a sales blitz, he suddenly goes unregistered. Then he returns same name and with his previous feedback intact. No indication he was gone from eBay for a few weeks! Amato Battery only shows 8 feedback but when you access the account you find 89 for last month alone! Amato posts dozens and dozens of positive, almost worshipfull feedback for Sino_Battery.

What got me suspicious is Sino sells batteries that are extremely difficult to get for orphan PDAs and Handhelds, cameras, etc. He not only claims to have quality brand new replacements but he sells them usually for 1cent to 99cents. Look under shipping and you find he actually charges people by way of excessive shipping charges. He never argues with buyers. He just is very quick to offer an exchange or total refund. Why not? Send someone a dummy battery or depleted wrong knock off battery for $15 shipping and 99cent charge, its a good deal (for) him to refund 99cents. Exchange is a real laugh. Of course, all eBay sellers require unhappy buyers to swallow original shipping and to pay shipping for exchanges. So, this artist makes profit from exchanges. He, of course, does not charge the 99cents, just the $15 or more shipping to exchange your dud for another battery.

Of course, I am not accusing Sino or Amato (of Canada) of anything dishonest. I just report what may be concluded from the data contained in their public feedback file.

I strongly recommend to online buying novices that you take a look at two eBay competitors, SELL.COM & UBID.COM.

Sell.com has a very simple selling price structure, nothing complex and expensive like eBay. Ads are inexpensive at SELL and run for 30 days. If your item does not sell, you can relist it a month at a time for free until it sells or for a year. Like newspaper classifieds, SELL does not insist on working sellers like the US government works businesses. Sell does not charge you for selling, after they already charged you for posting. Ubid controls postage. For books, movies and video games & gear Half.com controls postage and collects your money. Eventhough eBay has owned Half.com for over 3 years and despite immediately removing the Half.com buyer direct link to staff, half.com remains a better market for consumers than eBay SEEMS to be for many buyers.

--Bruised

[dsigma6]

my eyes are tired...

after all that i cant really remember if you purchased anything from him, or just asked questions?

my favorite reply to his negative feedback is "Hi, Sorry,Please let me know what problem of this battery, we will follow.Thanks," even though they say that the [censored] thing is DEAD. i almost emailed him, but i shouldnt instigate!

hes up to something, and the shipping thing is a darn good idea for a low life scammer. ebay needs to step up like you noted for other sites shipping rates. im sure they wouldnt want to trouble themselves with restructuring the fee scale to accomodate that though.

edit: no one is even bidding on his thousands of items!

[dsigma6]

ok i set my (im)maturity aside and emailed him.

i sent some gibberish as follows:

how long to the goo fnoo chai?

he responded (in a timely fashion might i add!):

Hi ,
Thank you for your inquiry!
We will ship the battery to you after received you payment!
Just few days(3-10),you can receive the battery!
Thank you.
sino

i might be the only one laughing, but im ok with that

[BillMorrow]

i'm SHOCKED..! SHOCKED i say, SHOCKED to hear that ebay is a hotbed of crooks..

this type of scam has been going on for YEARS on ebay..

as well as the byzantine circuitous route to report ANYTHING to ebay..
that said, ebay is not the only one to make contacting them near impossible..
google is another one..
waste of time and the crooks know it..

forget it, all you will do is make yourself crazy..

let the fools send $$ to nigeria so the nigerian minister of oil will send THEM umptyumpbux back..

and let the fools buy crap for nothing on ebay and pay $20 for $2 postage..



let me add, here, as a postscript, that i have found many many bargains and fair deals on ebay.. by avoiding the obvious crooks..

[AlphaKilo470]

When I sell on eBay, I normally have shipping charge based on shipping calculator and I work in a small fee based on total price to cover those darned f***ing PayPal fees I've been getting ever since getting a premier account.

I think the best way to go about eBay is before buying anything, not only look at a sellers feedback but also ask your self how profitable it would be to scam someone on the given item. An old ThinkPad 760 or even a 600 will most likely be as pictured and described and will probably be a safe buy because the seller knows it's an old out of demand item that wouldn't be worth trying to get much for. A T43, on the other hand, would fetch high demand and a seller could easily use that name and reputation to scam a sap out of their money. With that said, you still need to look at feedback and shipping and definitley read the fine print if there is any.

Personally, I believe in the concept of the fittest being the ones who survive (also known as "Darwinism") and those dumb enough to fall for a scam like the Nigerian millionaires desperate to lose some pounds or dollars or pesos or whatever will either smarten up and do better in the future or he'll keep going as he was and eventually have a nasty, gene pool-cleaning fall.

Essentially, it all comes down to the cliched rule of if it's something at a price seemingly too good to be true, it's probably a scam. There are no free lunches and everything will have an associated cost and somewhere down the line those costs will have to be balanced out.

[underclocker]

All true.

Just one note.

High shipping fees and low price aren't always a scam. Many quality sellers do this to cheat eBay and PayPal out of fees - since fees are not assessed on shipping charges.

Therefore, if you are selling a WiFi card for $1 plus $29 shipping, your fees are pennies versus selling the same card for $30 plus free shipping, where your fees might be about $4 total.

Many sellers do this. Eventually eBay will address excessive shipping charges and close this loophole.

[BruisedQuasar]

I know. There is truth in every addition to what I posted, when I began this thread. My topic was a warning about Sino-Battery, not eBay.

Sellers who sell through eBay face about as much danger of electronic stick-up as do buyers. In fact, the problem of buyers being cheated through eBay is well reported in the media but the media is uninterested in the other side of the coin, the thieves who pose as buyers & stick-up sellers.

I mentored several people in setting up eBay businesses and I am an active partner with two eBay sellers.

There are sellers who aim threats of negative feedback and filing with eBay at buyers, but there are also buyers who extort more than they should get by threatening smaller sellers with negative feedback.

Anyone interested in a totally different approach should look over ubid.com and sell.com. Sell.com is modeled after the huge Japanese online marketplace that succeeded where eBay failed miserably in Japan. The company is now exporting their site all over Asia. At sell.com, sellers never have to accept a bid or offer to buy and negotiation private one on one, just like the Japanese "eBay". It is a classified ad approach. Listings of multiple items cost no more than for one item. There is one fee posting for 30 days, no point of sale fee. Sell does not insist on being a partner who wins when you lose and wins more when you sell.

--Bruised