Fighting with shady eBay sellers

-

I'm disappointed Amazon is not yet offering an International version of Kindle DX. I'm disappointed Plastic Logic is not delivering a product, just the name (QUE) is not enough to me. So I decided to get a U.S. Kindle DX and, as Amazon is not selling it overseas I thought eBay was a good place to get one.

After a few days I saw that, from time to time, some sellers offered refurbished units. I read good comments on Mobileread.com and Lectoreselectronicos.com about refurbished units (i.e. look brand new, 18% off) for $399 so I was sold.

I bought one DX from a seller named iRebates after contacting with a previous buyer who have had a good experience and was based in Spain too. That seller had a good reputation with more than three thousand successful transactions. It all looked ok. So I shelled out the dough and sat down and waited. And then waited a bit more and essentially nothing else happened. Three days later I asked the seller about my shipment. I was told it had not happened yet.

After more than one week without news from the seller I emailed him. Nothing happened. So a few days later I emailed again. Same result.

By that time seller still had listed items on eBay and feedback was coming in. However the amount of negative feedback started to show a steep increment. Things were looking really bad and still no news from the seller. Time to file a PayPal dispute.

When you file a PayPal dispute, PayPal contacts the seller/buyer to set the record straight. Later, if you're unhappy you can escalate the dispute to a claim. This time however, I was only allowed to file a claim (I guess something was already going on regarding this particular seller and PayPal).

Next day I've got a message from PayPal stating my money was refunded. Good, at least I'm not burned. However, I was left unharmed but without my Kindle. By then, iRebates had no more products listed for sale on eBay.

Things can always get worse, so next day I received an automated message from eBay stating that the seller had filed an Unpaid item case against me (actually it seems he did this with many customers). Two eBay customer representatives later I learned they could do nothing to help me at the moment. Though I was told to respond I never found out what I could do to respond. I think it is a loophole in eBay system what allows a seller who received payment to file such a claim.

Maybe the seller was trying to frighten customers with an eventual Unpaid item strike if they left negative feedback. However negative feedback was the only possible outcome of this shopping experience.

So I thought it was time to disturb some of my friends in the states asking them to forward a package from Amazon to Spain. But what if there is any problem.

Eventually I settled with a company doing the forwarding work. I reviewed both MyUS.com and Shipito.com and I used the latter. Now I now Amazon's partner seller has already shipped my DX to my address in California. Hopefully I 'll get it home in a few more days.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

VFD control with Arduino using RS485 link

-
Image
Variable Frequency Drives ( VFD ) allow the control of spindles so speed can accurately be controlled and a detailed acceleration profile for the spindle and reverse rotation can all be handled. In essence a VFD is an three phase inverter for three-phase AC motor. I am using a popular (I mean cheap) Chinese VFD and though the reference manual is not great, I could see there is a built-in RS-485 port. I usually control the start, stop and speed selection using the keyboard on the unit but I thought it will be more useful if I could control everything from the same Arduino is doing our CNC table control. Some cheap RS-485 off eBay and some lines of code later, I can start, stop and change the speed from an Arduino. What a cool thing to have! Some configuration of your VFD are needed before you can use it like that.  You need to set PD163=1 (I am using address 1 in the code). PD=164=1 (for setting serial to 9600bps) and PD165=0 (for using ASCII and 8N1 character format)
Read more

How to get sinusoidal s-curve for a stepper motor

-
Image
After some experimentation, and delving a bit into the math of motion, I realized there can be a significant difference on the motion of a machine by just making small changes. A common and popular approach to smooth one axis of motion is to use a trapezoidal speed pattern, where acceleration and deceleration are uniformly accelerated movements (aka constant acceleration motion) separated by a portion happening at cruising speed. The problem comes with the fact that, while that approach is simple to understand and to code, it does contain sudden changes in the acceleration, that show as spikes on the acceleration derivative, called jerk. These sudden changes in the acceleration translate into undesired vibration in our machines. Most of that can be eliminated by selecting a motion pattern that does not contain sudden changes of acceleration. If we chose a mathematical function for our speed whose second derivative is continuous, then we reduce system vibration quite a lot. One ma
Read more

Importing OpenSCAD designs into Onshape

-
Image
After using Onshape CAD software for a while I am really fond of it. So one natural thing to do, specially once they have released the Instructor's kit is to start using it in the classroom too. But one thing I was not so sure how to do was to use old designs I made using OpenSCAD. It does not mean I am completely quitting using OpenSCAD but suddenly I can see I can do assemblies in Onshape that will look quite nice for showing and documentation purposes if only I could easily import from OpenSCAD. I am glad to report that the route OpenSCAD --> FreeCAD --> Onshape worked brilliantly. Even more when a few tricks were applied. While some people suggest to import CSG files from OpenSCAD to FreeCAD, I have had more success by directly importing SCAD files into FreeCAD. One trick that worked well for me was to get rid of $fn references, so now circles become real circles (or cylinders) in FreeCAD. If a part keeps some $fn references then your cylinders or circles wi
Read more