I recently sold an item on ebay - other sellers have been selling the same item with £12 postage so I do the same.
Auction end's buyer pays and I manage to get recorded delivery arranged for £7. Item arrived and buyer confirms receipt. All good.
However now the buyer is requesting the refund of £5 he was "overcharged" p&p. I am fairly ambivalent - on the one hand, the buyer bought the item knowing the postage & packaging was £12 and accepted this when they placed the winning bid, however I don't really wan't the negative feedback.
If I were to refund the £5 I am concerned that the buyer could then open a dispute get refunded the whole amount and so be £5 up (plus have the item I sold).
So - do I refund or tell them to do one..?
postage was £7, packaging materials and time was £5.
tell him to do one.
That's what he agreed to. It's not excessive and you could easily argue that it was the cost of packaging etc.
It's clearly displayed on the auction page. If he didn't like it, he shouldn't have bought it
Tell him to jog on. He agreed, the fact he could only see 7 quids worth of postage doesn't mean it only cost you 7 quid to send it - let's assume you had to put it in a box, take it to the post office etc.
It's £12 p&p. Made up of £7 for p and £5 for p.
Wrapping something up and arranging delivery isn't done for free.
So your time and fuel to the post office is free? Packaging is free? Car park / meter is free? Tell him to stroll on, bloody chancer.
agreed - petrol to the town to go to the post office. Car parking. Cost of packaging. Your time at £14/hour (UK average wage stripped back to an hourly basis)
Offer to send him an invoice for the true cost of posting the item rather than just the cost of the stamps, and then whack him with even more than the £5 he thinks you owe him.
Left negative feedback once for postage, but it was because the seller had underpaid and I needed to pay to collect it from the Post Office, felt that was justified.
I wouldn't care if the postage was a few pounds cheaper on an item i received, you've agreed to the total cost upfront so why should you really care? Buyer can grumble a bit but he doesn't really have any come back.
eBay even accepts that the p and p costs include sellers time and materials. Have a look through the t and C's point the buyer to it.
Thanks all
As others have said. You've quoted a price which he's agreed to. P&P isn't the raw postage costs alone.
I had one of these a while ago. OH sold a bunch of stuff and one coincidentally was in my home town. I thought I'd do them a favour and hand-deliver it so they'd get it earlier. The buyer kicked off that she'd been charged P&P and we hadn't posted it! Neatly ignoring my travel costs and taking personal time out of my lunch hour to take it round. I was adamant to tell her to get knotted, but my OH refunded her in the end.
People.
Tell him to do one. It doesn't help though that commercial operations typically post (albeit at scale and with a commercial model to support them) for free so it's easy for people to perceive that they're being ripped off for postage.
Make sure you include in your £5 charge time taken to fish through your recycling bin for packing materials.
Whilst it annoys me when you see an item for, say, £40 plus £57.72 p&p, I don't buy things that have ridiculous P&P on them. Yours sounds pretty reasonable as others have said and you've concluded, as it's for postage AND packaging.
Whilst it annoys me when you see an item for, say, £40 plus £57.72 p&p
you used to not pay ebay fees on P&P, i think thats changed now.
you used to not pay ebay fees on P&P, i think thats changed now.
Yep. I once paid £390p&p on a £10 bike, not anymore though...
I had something similar with a Spanish fella recently - all my auctions are set to UK only.
He bid on & won an item, a PS1 game. I told him the courier cost would be £8.00, he then told me that he usually pays £4.00 for such things sent from the Post Office. This went back & forth for a while, with me refusing to budge (actual cost to me not including packaging was £7.80ish) & he was refusing to pay. He then started to threaten me with negative feedback, accusing me of ripping him off, which really got my back up. So I then sent him a very long email explaining the cost incurred to me of actually going to the post office due to the hassle of living in a rural location, including fuel & parking & my time, 2 trips, one to get a quote & one to post it. I came to the conclusion it would cost about £75.00 he then spat the dummy. He refused to pay & left negative feedback. I reported him for non payment, spoke to an ebay helper who after going through the email trail found it hilarious & removed the negative feedback.
So to cut a long story short, no, don't refund the postage - if they leave you negative/neutral feedback ebay would probably side with you as they cost to post was clear from the original auction.
you used to not pay ebay fees on P&P, i think thats changed now.
Thought it might be something like that.
It's not as annoying as "Apollo mountain bike for sale NOT Scott Scale, Specialized FSR, Giant" etc.
Even if an item with a description like that WAS what I was after, they could **** right off for being an annoying ****.
philjunior you need to join me in reporting those for keyword spamming. I report them all the time when it get redirected on a search to some unrelated tat
FWIW I seem to remember posting something recently and the Post Office bloke asking if I wanted the price not to be shown on the stamp thingy.
It’s not as annoying as “Apollo mountain bike for sale NOT Scott Scale, Specialized FSR, Giant” etc
oh bugger thats me! ha ha
Do you put "L@@K" on auctions too? Either should result in an automatic halving of any final price, like a **** tax.
I sold a load of dvds a few years back and quite literally kicked myself after realising the error I'd made in only quoting for the price of postage. Individually wrapping and dispatching a boxful of these things took so long, and I spent a fortune on wrapping and tape, most of them sold for about 50p, good grief. Keep your £5 and enjoy it 👍
P and P innit
Postage was £7 & Packaging was £5
Just politely explain this to them, people often forget about the packing side of things and assume that they have been done over because there is a difference between what you charged and what the postal cost says on the item.
<span style="font-size: 0.8rem;">if you offered free P&P would the buyer repay your postage? If the buyer told you the item was worth less than he'd bid would you refund him?</span>
The buyer agreed P&P when they bid. You can explain, or ignore. But why would you change it?
