So, today has already been...interesting. Apologies in advance for the lengthy post.
My wife and I ordered a cabinet on eBay from a reputable seller a few weeks ago. We never received a tracking number, but that didn't bother us until the package failed to arrive. We shot the seller an eBay message three days after the estimated delivery date. No response. We e-mailed them four days after that. No response. We opened a dispute through eBay three days later. No response.
...until daybreak this morning, when at the 11th hour before the dispute was set to close in our favor, the seller shared a tracking number that proved the item was delivered three weeks ago. eBay closed the dispute in the seller's favor mere minutes later, before we had a chance to look into the tracking number, leaving us out the $200 with nothing to show for it.
Bewildered and confused, we turned our attention from the seller to the tracking number, determined to find out what had happened.
The first thing we found odd was that USPS' site indicated they had delivered the package "to/at mailbox", despite our mailbox being nowhere near large enough to fit the piece of furniture we had ordered. Figuring that maybe USPS was holding it at their office after some sort of mixup, we dashed off to the USPS office right after they opened this morning.
We told the USPS guy that we were expecting a piece of furniture and that we had a tracking number, so he punched the number in and then asked us for our address, chuckling a bit as we told him what it was. "Yeah, that's not where it was delivered". As it turns out, our package had not only been delivered elsewhere, it had actually been
addressed elsewhere, specifically to a Cracker Barrel restaurant a few miles away.
"Cracker Barrel has our furniture?!", we asked incredulously.
That's when he started laughing even more. "You said it was
furniture? The tracking number you gave me is for a package about this big", he said, holding his hands up in a rectangle about the size of a piece of paper. "Take a look", he said, flipping the monitor around so that we could see a picture taken at the time of delivery. Sure enough, it showed a bubble mailer envelope addressed to Cracker Barrel with "our" tracking number on the shipping label. He was kind enough to print off the grainy picture so that we had some form of proof that the seller's tracking number didn't match up with our package or our address.
Back to eBay we went. After explaining our discoveries on the phone, offering to send the picture in (it didn't scan well), and pointing out that they could verify our claims by seeing that the item was listed on the USPS site as being delivered via
parcel delivery rather than
package delivery, they let me know that they'd re-open the dispute, but that I'd need to fill out an IC3 form before they could issue a refund.
Finally, a resolution to the matter!
Except, it isn't. In looking around online I quickly discovered that "IC3" is the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center, and that even after I fill out the paperwork and give evidence that the seller provided fraudulent information, eBay
still may not issue a refund. Oh, the joys of buying online.
All of which is to say, apparently I'll be finishing off my day by filing criminal charges against someone and hoping that eBay does the right thing.
What a day.
EDIT: And then I found out that our first child who's on the way will be a daughter.
