Item Not as Described - my hubbie packs it and is perfection personified!!!

[I8toys]

Been selling toys all summer and not had any real issues until today. Got a message today - cars lego V8 set - saying 3 cars are missing. As subject says hubbie packs it with miltary precision so cannot think they are not there!! I may be wrong!!

Anyway - we e-mailed back saying we can offer a full refund and we can collect the item at the weekend - they live not far away or offer partial refund of £10. Item was £26.00 postage included via courier.

Does this sound reasonable? Any other ideas welcomed.

sounds fair enough - make sure you get your item back and not a switch and refund via paypal from the payment itself, don't send them money as a separate payment.

Was going to offer cash on collection of item if they wanted the full refund.

did they pay by cash? If not you must refund from paypal otherwise they could take your cash then open a dispute with eBay and get their paypal money back too.l

Thanks for the advice

Oh boy - its more complicated than I thought! So do we refund them via paypal and then collect the item - what if they don't answer the door. Just trying to get around the courier return thing.

What do most people do with returns? Get the buyer to send it back and refund the postage costs. How do you know its been posted?

Are you sure they're not trying it on , we've had an issue with this sort of thing earlier this year . Sent an item ( unused) , buyer said it arrived with a bit missing , I said fine send it back I'll refund everything once I've got it , buyer said 'oh the broken bits here I was going to stick it back on ' , I said no don't just send it back and then never heard from them again ! They were obviously just hankering after me saying I'd refund and would they dispose of the broken item . TBH it really put us off selling anything for a while .

I don't like to think the worst of people but I am sure ebay brings them all out!! It could be our mistake but don't think so.

We've sold quite a lot and this is the only issue we've really had! Been quite lucky! I agree Floralnomad - you put a lot of time and effort making sure its all clean, items all there, correctly packaged and then this.

They've not responded yet. Thanks for the advice about Paypal Fergoose - revised e-mail with payment via paypal and not cash!!!!

no you never refund first - you want your item back - once you have checked your security marks and are sure it is your item only then do you refund, and only via paypal, so you log in there find the payment, click on it and then hit refund.

Is £10 a very generous partial refund as it seems a lot to me?

and generally sellers ask the buyer to return the item and then once returned they will check it and refund - but you never, ever refund before getting the item back, and you always refund correctly via their paypal payment.

Thank you Fergoose for the advice.

I am sure like everyone else I want to protect the 100% feedback we have.

well you could bend over backwards and do everything they ask and still get a neg - there really isn't any guarantee unfortunately.

The people in our case never left any feedback but TBH I was so pissed off it was worth risking it . Like yours my husband packs so brilliantly I knew it could not have suffered the damage in the post , we've had feedback saying how good our packaging is !