Has eBay stopped caring about Chinese sellers lying about location? ?

[dhansen_18]

Seriously, I ordered a (cheap, small) item that was supposed to be shipped locally.

After a week of being given a (local) tracking number and just after my package showed up at an international airport (anything shipped tracked will show up at a local depot first, not be recieved at an airport unless shipped from out of country, having bought from aliexpress and Ebay for over a decade I know this well) I checked Parcelsapp and to no surprise the parcel was shipped by Cainiao TO royalmail, an Aliexpress carrier and not one that ships within the UK.

So I checked the seller feedback, they have negative feedback going back over a year with people saying the exact same thing. "This seller is not based out of the UK" "This seller is not based out of the United States" "This seller isn't based in Sydney (Aus)" so honestly *bleep* is eBay doing? Shouldn't this seller have been kicked off the platform long before I even ordered? They're misleading their customers about the item location, causing an increase in delivery time and, worse, it allows them to undercut legitimate local sellers who buy stuff in and hope they can make a profit, however with bad actors like this, who Ebay seemingly don't wish to moderate it harms both buyers and sellers.

At this point it seems eBay is complicit, or at least more than happy enough to look the other way. 5-6 years ago this wouldn't have been a thing, I always used eBay as both a buyer and (small time) seller because of its fair moderation policies based on their rules.

I'll be doing exactly what Louis Rossman recommended and returning the item, this means return postage needs to be paid, since return to China is too expensive someone will likely get a USB-C magnetic pass through for free and the seller will need to pay the refund and shipping to the 'return address' though with so much consistent, worldwide, negative feedback I'm done with eBay, I'll just order the item from Ali myself if eBay is just Aliexpress with extra charges and nebulous returns policies now.

Pic (multiple negative feedback comments from about the last 10-12 negative feedback left on a single seller, stitched together) related, despite this feedback and clear breach of eBay TOS this seller is still up and running. eBay, you've lost any trust I had left for you being the "better than amazon" online shopping site. Especially since allowing this *bleep* to continue stabs local sellers in the back, while irritating the hell out of buyers who are told "48 hour post" then wait over a week for China express.

[tressygirl]

The location on a listing is the item location and not the location of the seller.

Many Chinese sellers use a warehouse ,a depot to send the items from the UK to facilitate a faster dispatch. If the item arrives with a UK stamp then all is good, the seller is  not breaking the rules here.

However,  if the item location states the UK, and the item arrives weeks later with a Chinese stamp, this seller has broken the rules,  and you can report the seller.  There is a report button half way down the right hand side of every listing.

To check where a seller is located before buying , check their Feedback profile, it will show the seller's country of registration,  feedback is also a good clue on the quality of items received from  other buyers, well worth looking at before any purchase,  you can then decide whether to buy , or not to buy from that seller.

[dhansen_18]

Their location was stated as London.

The item shipped from China.

This can be found, easily, by using a universal item tracker (such as parcelsapp) as this checks if the item was handed off by another courier to RM. Also an item doesn't (usually, in 99% of cases) arrive to RM into an international airport, warehouse or not, both Cainiao shipping (Aliexpress shipping's courier) handing it off to RM 5 days after the order was placed and it arriving in Heathrow International make it very sus, paired with international feedback complaints from 3 different continents, as can be seen in the image linked in the post above.

Additionally I reported this to eBay. This was their response:

"Thanks again for reporting the listing(s) you found. 

What happened:
We looked into your report and didn’t find the listing to be in violation of our policy. This determination was made using automation or artificial intelligence."

So their AI can't even check feedback from the last 6 months and compare if people had similar issues. This is either eBay being complicit, or willfully blind.

Is there a way I can talk to a person who might be able to check the tracking number and see that the parcel was handled by a Chinese shipping company before handing over to RM? Or am I just going to have to automatically return the item to make the seller hurt financially (as there's no way they can afford to pay for return shipping to China, shipping from China is subsidised via our taxes, but shipping back to China is expensive) and leave even more negative feedback?

Seems like eBay doesn't care anymore, 10 years ago and my complaint would have went to an actual person, who would have quickly noticed the heap of negative feedback from the UK the US and Australia all saying "ships from China despite claiming to be local" yet now they run reports of TOS violations through a mentally deficient AI and call it done, apparently.

[*help_no_brakes*]

Is there any reason why you did not look at the feedback before buying?

By doing this you would have also seen the seller's country of registration.

Doing this works for me to avoid buying from these sellers.

[dhansen_18]

Considering that eBay is a paid service (seller pays to sell, their sales costs are made up for by the buyer) and not Craigslist or Gumtree should vetting every single minor buy be a necessity? Sure if I'm spending more than £50 I might check feedback, though for small purchases? Nah.

Again, eBay is a paid service, you would expect that they can afford to pay moderators instead of YouTube tier AI tools that can't even read over feedback, which a human could do in 5 minutes, assuming it takes 5 minutes to read the report, 5 minutes to check negative feedback and 5 more to mark that seller down as having broken the TOS you're looking at  15 minutes of total work, an eBay intern makes £12 an hour roughly, so it would cost eBay £4 per bad actor to start cleaning up their site. Obviously this is an optimistic figure and doesn't take everything into account, though it's hardly like they'd be paying through the nose to make their platform trustworthy.

This is like saying "Well why did you go into that area? The police rarely go there, should have checked the crime map before you got mugged" when as a taxpayer the police should be enforcing the law regardless of area, same with eBay and their TOS.

The seller is breaking the TOS, eBay is doing nothing, this means that legitimate sellers get undercut and driven out of the market because they can't compete with people ordering from aliexpress to the buyers address.

The point of this thread isn't "Oh no I'll have to wait longer for my item", given that I'll be checking the package for a Chinese shipping label, photographing it and then just slapping a returns label on it (since this costs the seller more than just demanding a refund and is the only way to make them actually hurt financially and give them the kick up the pants they need) I'll just be ordering from another seller.

The point of this thread is "I pay eBay to moderate their marketplace with every item I buy (sure the seller pays the costs, however those costs are covered with the cost of the item sale) yet they don't moderate their site to penalize people who break their TOS? You even need to wait to leave negative feedback now, which just reduces the amount of negative feedback left via slippage since not many people are going to note down "leave negative feedback" in their calander.

Tl:Dr what has happened to ebay?

[doctorswann]

The simple answer is 'yes'. 
eBay has completely given up on policing item location misrepresentation, there was a (now defunct) Reddit group called 'r/scambustinguk' whose members spent an entire weekend flagging and reporting Chinese sellers who were claiming to be in either London or Manchester,  over the weekend they reported 622 sellers who were misrepresenting their location and then monitored the results.
Of the 622 listings reported, none were removed and none changed their listings from UK to China.
Reporting them does nothing, eBay simply isn't interested in dealing with the issue because the Chinese scammers are too lucrative.

[ricbek23]

To be honest, it's cost you much more time writing and replying to others than it would have taken just to have a look simply at feedback, which I do  each and every time now no matter what,especially if it's so important a topic for yourself. But I agree with you, it's a real problem, I've all but stopped buying anything off this lot nowadays and their Chinese plastic!

[tressygirl]

If the location of the item on the listing states the UK and you need to send the item back for whatever reason,  then never be fobbed off by the seller,  and you usually will be,  that the item needs to go back to China,  it doesn't,   it goes back to the UK so don't worry about cost.

For item not as described the seller pays for that tracked service, if they don't  send the label within 3 days,  just escalate the case,  eBay step in force the refund,  and you don't have to send the item back.

@dhansen_18