Paid in a Timely Fashion — Shipped Fashionably Late

You know what I frigging hate?  Asshole ebay sellers who enjoy the courtesy I offer them of an instantaneous online payment (via PayPal), and then take their sweet time getting around to shipping whatever it was I paid them for.  Witness this auction

As I've said I'm working on two new caches which I was hoping to hide this weekend if not sooner.  The only thing I actually need now is the ammo boxes.  No problem right?  The auction ended on May 21.  It includes no shipping price, so I had to e-mail the guy at end-of-auction and request a total.

On May 22 I heard back from him, and I paid him the total amount ($43) via PayPal, an instantaneous service which allows people to exchange money for goods online.  I figured I'd have the item in about 5 days or so.

But by 3:30 PM on May 31 (nine days later) I was tired of drumming my fingers and waiting, so I fired off a quick e-mail.

Hi. You received a paypal payment from me on May-22 for 5 of these ammo boxes. It is now May-31 and I have neither received this item or any confirmation that it has shipped. In my experience, first class mail from Texas to Massachusetts should take about 5 days. When was this item shipped?

A couple of hours later (5:42 PM) I got the following message back:

I will email you a tracking number this afternoon. I am at work right now and the tracking number is at home.

I figured, sweet!  Since he already had a tracking number I probably would be getting my package any day now.  I didn't hear back from him until the next morning:

The ammo cans were shipped fed ex ground. The tracking number is [omitted].

So I promptly checked the FedEx website:

Tracking number [omitted]
Ship date May 31, 2005 
Estimated delivery   Jun 6, 2005

Thanks a lot, dickweed.


6 thoughts on “Paid in a Timely Fashion — Shipped Fashionably Late

  1. Wow, that's annoying. I only had one really badly delayed auction and that turned out to be because of a funeral. The seller notified me of the reason and I got the item a week or so later.
    Why lie? He had to know you were going to see the ship date?
    BTW – you have a copy/paste error in the post. It looks like the section from “You know what I hate” to “Fed Ex website:” is in there back-to-back.

  2. Well, you can leave him neutral or negative feedback. What was his feedback rating? I know my SIL ebays more than I do and she won't do business with anybody whose feedback is less than 99.8%. (I don't know if she looks at the amount of feedback, too.) I've used that guideline of hers and I haven't had any disappointments yet, but I don't ebay that much.

  3. Yeah, he had good feedback:

    Feedback Score: 441
    Positive Feedback: 99.6%
    Member since Dec-10-00 in United States

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