The nature of the buyer-seller relationship on the marketplace eBay provides an abundant market for crime and chaos. Among stealthy-minded individuals, the flexible nature of eBay provides a marketplace for scamming and fraud. This is evidenced by the straightforward nature of listing and selling items on eBay with little to no verification of the authenticity of items. Although eBay provides the option to “guarantee authenticity” to buyers, it comes at a premium of $40 for the buyer to pay. However, no item is required to go through this rigorous process of verification to be listed and sold as an item on eBay.
To further elucidate this, imagine the following: You are interested in a designer Prada bag so you check online to see if there are any limited edition bags available. Naturally, eBay listings arise in your search results. Eager and interested by the price which appears to be the fraction of retail, you click on the item. Thousands of buyers are watching this Prada bag, and it says 256 have already sold. You think to yourself, how could this be possible? If this was a limited edition Prada bag, how could 256 already sold? Well, put simply, they are not real. However, this marketplace is extremely lucrative for sellers who often pay pennies for items that they turn around and sell for thousands to gullible buyers. This loophole became apparent to me when I discovered a Chinese website called “DHgate” which produces nearly identical-looking designer goods and exports to U.S. buyers. Once I found the exact match for the Prada bag, I could see that it was only being sold for $30 on DHgate, while on eBay the seller listed it for $1,200 plus shipping.
When sellers are not scamming buyers, buyers can scam sellers. One item that I sold on eBay was a Tag Heuer watch. After winning a bidding war, my buyer messaged me stating that he was no longer interested in the watch and would be shipping it back. I was shocked considering he had been bidding on the watch for several days straight but now suddenly had cold feet after he bought it. This caused me a great deal of trouble when he refused to use the return shipping label provided by eBay, claimed my item was not authentic, and repeatedly harassed me. Furthermore, he never returned the watch to me and asked eBay to step in and provide him with a refund. Naturally, I was shocked and went through an hour of trying to contact customer service to resolve this scam. However, if I had not resolved it immediately, the buyer would have been issued a refund immediately, and I would have walked away with no payment and no watch.
