Have you ever found yourself in a situation where someone has done something you cannot find any rational explanation for? Have you ever found yourself looking at the person and saying "huh"?
Of course you have. We all have, probably multiple times. It happened to me again recently. On this occasion it happened online so I did not get the chance to say "huh" to their face, but I am still left befuddled, and this post is my attempt to try to understand what happened. I hope you are not expecting huge insights from this post. If anything, you might find yourself more confused by the end of it like I am…
The scenario
I was recently in search of a bracelet to give as a gift to a friend. This was a replacement for a bracelet which had been lost and needed to be a specific style. The designer who made the bracelet originally no longer sells them, which left me with the options of trying to find it from a specialist jeweller, or else buying it secondhand. A quick search of local jewellers (with a website) found nothing, so I resorted to secondhand. My first port of call, eBay.
I don't use eBay too often. The most recent purchase before this one had been a replacement bracket for the baby's crib which had broken as I was putting it together. After a search for the part name and a scroll through several pages of results, I found a seller in London with spares galore.
Searching for the bracelet started out even easier. Numerous pieces of jewellery by the designer came up, but only two were the right design. One piece was listed as secondhand and used. Looking at the pictures provided, it had clearly been well used. The second item was a little more pricey, but listed as unused. The posting came with several pictures of a hand holding the bracelet, and the estimated delivery date was a week before I needed it. It did not take me too long to decide to order this bracelet.
Ordering and paying went without a hitch, and I received my confirmation email from eBay. Within a day or two I expected to receive a second email telling me it had been posted, by the end of the week it should have been dropping through the letterbox.
You can probably guess this did not happen. The expected delivery date came and went, with no sign of the bracelet and no communication from the seller. For those of you who have not used eBay, if you have an issue with a purchase, you must first try contacting the seller. If that does not resolve the issue, then you can ask eBay to step in and solve the problem for you. With the delivery day behind us and no sign of my order, I took step one and waited.
And waited, and… well short story short nothing happened. No reply from the seller, not even an acknowledgement of receiving my message. A couple more days and with no response or delivery, I contacted eBay.
I expected this to take a while to resolve, but in the end it took an hour or two. eBay told me they had not received any form of tracking information or evidence of posting from the seller, no evidence the purchase had been sent at all. They cancelled the sale and reimbursed me.
The additional info
At the same time I was raising the non-delivery with eBay, two other things were happening.
Firstly, I went looking around other sites for an alternative bracelet. I found one for sale on Etsy this time, a little cheaper, and within three days of ordering the bracelet arrived! I do not often include promotions in my blog posts, but on this occasion I'm happy to recommend Bigetsy Vintage Store on Etsy. Not only were they super efficient, it turns out they are based in Yorkshire too so I'm recognising a small Yorkshire store.
The second thing that happened was I did a little snooping around the eBay "seller". Yes, I probably should have done this before purchasing the bracelet, but c'est la vie. What I discovered about the seller would have been red flags. To start they had no feedback, positive, negative or even neutral, in the last year. Their account had been created in 2021 but they did not seem to have any other items on sale, and clearly without the feedback had not been selling anything for some time. Aside from the bracelet I had tried to buy, it looked like the seller had done nothing with their account.
The question
So the question is; why on Earth did the seller put the bracelet up for sale in the first place?
The solutions
In no particular order:
The scam post
Probably the obvious solution, the one I first jumped to and the one you probably all have in mind as well, the post was a scam. In this solution the seller never intended to send the bracelet, they would take the money and then disappear.
The main problem with this solution, why go to all the effort? The post came with several photos of the bracelet and a clear description which matched. After three years of an account doing nothing, why suddenly upload one post to scam someone. I would imagine if someone was looking to scam people out of money, they would have included more than the single post, and put less effort into each post. They also have the slight problem of the eBay protections which see the buyer getting their money returned if they do not complete the sale. A scam seems like an obvious solution, but I'm not so sure it makes sense.
The genuine post
My next thought was the seller had been genuine when they posted the bracelet for sale, but after posting it something had happened to stop them completing the sale.
Options here could include the seller becoming ill, the seller locking themself out of their eBay account, the seller not being as digitally connected and not checking their account regularly, or perhaps the seller had the item on two or more sites for sale and managed to get two hits at the same time. One slight less likely solution is the post is quite old, the seller after not having any interest forgot about the post, and is no longer actually looking to sell the bracelet.
The genuine sale with something going wrong is plausible, but without the seller contacting me when they are able to do so to explain, it is unlikely we will ever know if one of these options are correct.
The weird and wonderful
If it was not a scam, and not a genuine post gone wrong, then what weird and wonderful ideas can we come up with to explain the non-sale?
Could it be I have imagined the whole thing? Maybe I did not attempt to buy the bracelet but think I did. Yes I have confirmation emails and can still find the original listing on my eBay account, but maybe this is all part of my imagination as well.
Or what if eBay was running some bizarre test of its complaints resolution team where it created fake postings to see how they managed things when a complaint was raised? Yes, I know the response from eBay was almost certainly automated without a human involved. They might have been testing their robots…
Or maybe, just maybe, after purchasing the bracelet I slipped into a parallel universe, one where the bracelet was not on sale and never had been. What if I am still there now? What if you are too?
What if… I've been reading into this a bit too much and need to stop?!
Do you have a favourite explanation for my non-shopping experience? Do you have an explanation of your own? Let us know in the comments below.
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