A crook of an eBay seller: eBay ID “jdsmarine” and “heatherblu”
Since I repaired the DOA radio I bought from eBay I have given the seller the option to reconcile the issue by spliting the repair cost of $40 with me. That means I’m asking him for a partial refund of $20 for the $50 broken radio he sold me. The responses I’ve been getting are just unbelievable. Not only does this eBay seller not willing to work with me on any of these issues, he is to the point of blatantly lying about the conditions of the item now. In his last post he is claiming that his radio is in “perfectly working” condition. This guy is insane. Does this look like “perfectly working” condition?
Definition of “Not Perfectly Working” Condition
Here is a screenshot of all of this guys negative feedbacks from eBay:
If you ever come across this guy on eBay, DO NOT BUY ANYTHING FROM HIM. He goes by the eBay name “jdsmarine” and “heatherblu”. Apparently in May of 2005 he decided he just had too many negative feedbacks with the old account “heatherblu” that he needed to get a new account. Since then he has racked up more negative feedbacks in his new account.
This is where ebay can be problematic for people that sell a lot of stuff. By looking at his overall rating you see it in triple digits. That appears to be good because this guy sells alot of items on ebay. When you buy something from him you are basically rolling the dice. If you get lucky, which happens to be majority of the time, you will receive the item as described. When you don’t, forget about dealing with him after the fact. This is where the eBay rating system basically falling apart at its core. They are no ways to prevent sellers from posting retaliatory feedbacks to their buyers. My opinion is that once the payment is made by the buyer, their part of the transaction is fulfilled and the seller must post feedback based soley on that experience. However, almost all sellers wait until a positive feedback is posted for them before they reply with one of their own. This system provokes this kind of tit-for-tat retaliatory feedback environment.
The bottom line to this story is that you can more or less feel safe about buying on ebay if you know what to look for. I would suggest that from now on, don’t buy anything from anyone unless you have read all of the negative feedbacks from the buyer regardless how few there are. You may just end up being one of them if you don’t.
Here is a cool site that shows just the negative feedbacks of any user on ebay.
http://www.toolhaus.org/cgi-bin/negs
Sample pages:
May 30th, 2006 at 7:12 pm
Perhaps you should have provided his old ebay account name of heatherblu in the feeback you gave to jdsmarine to make it harder for him to escape his past.
May 30th, 2006 at 7:56 pm
Well, I haven’t left a feedback yet for him. Don’t know if its worth it to trade negative feedbacks at this point since I was able to fix the radio. If I decide to do it I definitely will expose him to his future customers.
May 31st, 2006 at 6:27 pm
Now this guy is saying that he will not give me a refund because the item has been “TAMPERED” with. If by “TAMPERING” you mean repairing it from a non-functioning condition to a working condition than he is absoluted correct. He is also saying that since I “tampered” with it he will no longer honor a refund. He will only accept the refund if it is in its original state. Well I suppose a sledge hammer and a salt water bath for a week will pretty much put this thing back in that original condition. I had to escalate this dispute in PayPal and we’ll see what the people there make of this guys behavior….
June 1st, 2006 at 5:14 am
Thanks for the warning. I’ll pass the info on this guy around as well. I’ll certainly never buy anything from him.