eBay failure - any ideas?

Bought a grinder on eBay. $56.50 including shipping.

It gets here, doesn't work. The cord is flaky. Move it, it stops, move it, it runs slowly, move it again, it runs great. I communicate with the guy, we agree that he sends me $8 to cover a new cord.

I go to the garage to check out the cord, notice the back flange nut is missing. I contact the guy, he calls me a liar and a thief and asks that I send it back.

I start a return via Paypal and eBay. Dude yells at me for locking up his Paypal account. I ship it back UPS, $11.

It arrives Wednesday, dude says he's gone for Christmas and he'll get to it on Monday. Today.

I get a refund for the balance, bringing me to $56.50. I honestly think that he tried to give me the $11, but didn't use Paypal properly. I ask him to send the $11, and he balks, tells me to call eBay. I do, they say he's supposed to send me a shipping label. He didn't. I shipped it on my own dime, I'm out of luck.

I guess I rented a broken grinder for $11 per minute. I know it's not a lot of money, but it stinks, and I'm probably never going to use eBay again.

Ideas?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Metabo-Used-Angle-Grinder-Model-W8115-4-1-2-10-000-RPMs-Bad-Boy-Tool-/172025939928

FWIW I generally consider any used item, or any cheap item shipped from overseas, to be a pure gamble on eBay - with the possible exception of when I'm dealing with a high-volume seller: i.e. A seller who specializes in used power tools, in your case.

Not coincidentally, this is the exact reason I no longer sell on eBay. When something like this goes wrong - and in this case it seems to be purely bad luck - it often ends up a huge PITA with neither party satisfied in the end.

In reply to petegossett:

I got it. Thanks.

tuna55 wrote: I'm probably never going to use eBay again.

Whoa, whoa, whoa! Stop with the crazy talk! Where else are you going to get your "One Size Fits All" coilovers for 39.99 or fart pipe mufflers for 19.95?

This is a told it last a lifetime. No refunds no returns

Yeah, I wouldn't have expected a whole lot...

I buy and sell on eBay all the time. You better believe my disclaimer boilerplate is a lot more detailed (and confidence-inspiring) than that brain fart I quoted above! You can kinda tell when a seller is a professional versus some dude phoning it in and trying to make a few bucks off of some garbage...honestly, with the sheer volumes of random crap a lot of people sell on eBay, I think a lot of the time "tested working" means they plugged it in, and it did something. This guy appears to be selling a totally random assortment of crap, which is a bad sign for him knowing much about any of it. I bet he's cleaning out storage units or something.

I pretty much ONLY sell video games and car parts and have a method for each, which gives me a lot of confidence as a seller (and means I virtually never deal with situations like these) while also giving the buyer a lot of confidence. I have only once had an incident kinda like this; sold an old Nintendo game, got a report back that it was freezing at the same spot constantly. It tested 100% fine on my end; eventually discovered that the buyer was using it on a cheap Chinese knockoff console and that the "freeze" was actually a primitive form of bootleg protection (thanks Google). Never got another response after pointing that out.

Also, I've never had to process a return, but AFAIK the way it works is after the seller accepts your initiation on their end, PayPal gives you a field to plug in your tracking number and cost which is then refunded after the item is re-delivered to the seller. If you jumped the gun, you're probably out of luck on that $11.

At the end of the day, eBay is a lot like Craigslist. It is a platform designed to facilitate a sale between two parties. eBay just handles more of the process than Craigslist; always best to do due diligence with either, but sometimes E36 M3 happens and someone ends up getting screwed.

If it makes you feel any better, I stopped using eBay in the late 1990s.

In reply to petegossett:

I moved mountains for a guy who bought a Zex kit I sold on EBay, it had been perfectly functioning the entire time I owned/used it, but magically less than a day after he gets it, the brain box doesn't work.....I did the footwork with Zex and had him send it in for warranty evaluation. Initially I was told it wasn't covered under warranty so I had a new one(mercifully they cut me a deal on it) drop shipped to the buyer in Cali. He was happy at that point, I was less so.....and then a twist. Less than a month later, I received a package from Zex.....enclosed was an updated version of the brain box and a note apologizing for a known problem with their old design.....turned out the first one was warrantied after all. I turned around and sold that one as a new item for double what I paid for the one I paid to ship to the buyer of the kit.

One thing I learned from that ordeal is to prepackaged nitrous bottles and tell UPS it's a cylinder head or something.....they refuse to listen to reason that a nitrous bottle with the valve open isn't pressurized. LoL

You would have likely came out ahead using HF stuff instead. If one did quit working, take it back and exchange it for a new one.

From 2000 to about 2005 I sold a couple hundred items on eBay - tools, shop manuals, a few cars, etc... Not one problem. Got out of it for a few years, had other things to do. A couple years ago I sold two items, had issues with both sales. Items ( motorcycle carbs ) were described exactly, multiple clear pictures, etc... Both times I got the "can I get some money back, you didn't include the throttle cable.". Really? It said in the descriptions that the cable was NOT included, and there was no cable in the pics. The level of buyer seems to have really gone downhill on eBay lately. I don't even bother with it anymore.

eBay gave me a $15 gift certificate for my trouble. I'm more or less happy.