I recently had a fun little eBay issue where a batch of my listings were flagged as counterfeit, “verified as questionable authenticity” by eBay’s authenticity team, and ultimately these items were delisted and it was very clearly laid out that if I tried to relist these items my account would be suspended. All of these listings were PSA, BGS, and CGC graded cards, so “questionable authenticity” or “counterfeit” makes absolutely no sense.
What I learned is that phone customer support cannot deal with these issues. They will claim to file appeals on your behalf, but these appeals, in my experience, never go anywhere. Over a week of communicating with phone support, two reps claim to have filed appeals on my behalf (never received follow-up) and a third rep said he’d have his supervisor return my phone call. The supervisor never even looked at the listings, just quoted policy and said that the decision was final and that I should not try to relist the items. Complete trash.
However, after a lot of digging, I found there’s a version of eBay customer support that’s 1) staffed by actual, US-based eBay employees (as opposed to foreign phone bank contractors), 2) will communicate in real-time with you as they investigate the issue, and 3) in my case, were able to get shit done and completely resolve the problem very quickly (less than an hour start to finish).
Phone support can resolve many common issues when you’re on the right side of eBay policy, but when you’re dealing with more complex situations they are nearly useless. Maybe this different customer support access is widely known, but I’d never heard of it before. I’m hesitant to just put it out there as I’d hate for it to get bogged down by really basic issues, so if you are dealing with an intractable issue that phone support absolutely cannot resolve, send me a message and I’ll give you more info.
I think I have the same number you are referring to. I can message you and check. Someone here sent it to me a month or so ago and I can echo everything you said. You always get someone US based, and they are much more willing to resolve a problem than quote policy.
In my searches, I’ve found that today, you can only block buyers with less than n feedback from bidding on multiple items, but not from bidding on all your items. If someone knows of a setting that I do not, please correct me.
wow this is insanity, glad it got sorted. reminds me of the time i attempted to sell evolutions packs. i opened the box bc it was in rough shape and a few of the packs were damaged bc of it so i just opened them. i listed like 33 packs i think as a lot and this random guy slid into my messages literally losing his shit. he was calling me stupid, saying the packs were overpriced (they were like $14 CAD a pack), no one would buy them, he could find them anywhere for cheaper (obviously he couldnt otherwise he wouldnt have even been messaging me), accusing me of ‘opening a box, pulling the charizard and then selling the rest of the packs’ (which even if i did do that, which i didnt-- wtf??), and then went on to close with a ‘generous’ lowball offer that i was ‘lucky’ he was offering. normally, i’d just ignore it, but this guy literally sent me a novel and i was just like… are you fucked bro? you come in here, guns blazing, hurling insults, accusing me of shit and you seriously think im going to still sell this to you in the end? like that was how you chose to make your offer lol? jokes on him tho, i delisted it immediately and decided to just open the packs; pulled the holo zard and the mega ex zard + a ton of other great cards. modern is rife with some egregiously rude and entitled people man
Seems like a very immature section of the hobby. Joined a local fb group a few days ago and had to immediately leave. Scammer this scammer that. Felt very toxic. Also seemed like everyone was a 17yr old charizardballer69 type.
I mean, to play devils advocate, it’s troublesome to exclude low feedback buyers because:
1)we’ve all been low feed back once
2)a recent consignment did well, and it was two low feedback bidders in a bidding war. Keeping those low feedback bidders out would’ve cost hundreds, maybe even a thousand dollars.
That’s the beauty of the authentication service on eBay, we can maximize the buyer pool and have a fiduciary ensure the card is as described. Really, I think it protects sellers more than buyers. Clearly, such a service is desperately needed for sealed product. Particularly, low and mid value modern which moves at such a high volume.
To be fair, the amount of fakes on ebay and fake profiles is staggering as well.
I have never seen so many profiles re using the same pic for a listing (and not providing additional pictures) and fake cards/product listing as of today.
But knowing that in this case the seller is very reputable and being so cunt about the way you call it a resealed box is what’s messed up.
I agree with this theoretically, but who could do this? We had high profile examples of sealed product being misidentified or mishandled by the services most qualified to provide that review. I don’t think any company is willing to stake their reputation on sealed product anymore.
That’s a fair point. I don’t know what form this would take but 3 years ago I would not have imagined the authenticity guarantee. I would’ve considered it almost pointless.
I’d be shocked if in the next few years eBay hasn’t set up some rules or something to make buying sealed product safer/cleaner. It seems like the natural next step will all the advancements they have made on their platform.
There may be a company doing this relatively soon.
Something one of the ebay reps mentioned was they wish sealed boxes went through authenticity guarantee to avoid these situations. Honestly the authenticity guarantee on graded cards has been a thing of beauty! If that model could work for sealed it would be great!
I’ve sold boxes($400-$500) there without a problem. Mercari seems more seller friendly. Buyer has 3 days after delivery to open a case then the transaction is closed. So there isn’t some long drawn out return window. They weren’t for boxes, but I’ve had two cases opened against me from buyers on Mercari for Pokemon cards. Mercari read my comments, screenshots, and our chat logs and sided with me both times. The issues were resolved very quickly. Cases on eBay are still a complete nightmare.
They’re so seller friendly that they screwed me when I bought a base zard that showed up with inking on the back that was not shown in the listing. Support agent literally told me to just resell the item myself if I didn’t like what I got.
