JTimothyA,

Ninety-seven percent of the time you and Michael and I are on opposing ends of things. But this time I have to agree with you whole-heartedly and I think you stated your case quite well.

Since reading the thread I have been really quite concerned. You see I am a seller and buyer on eBay. I got seriously scammed and have turned in a formal Fraud Report with eBay on a seller (along with a number of other's who were scammed). We have also filed complaints with the Post Office and the National Fraud group (can't remember their actual name). The unfortunate thing is that this seller is still scamming under a different name and they have locked their feedback so that it can't be viewed. This seller had to add insult to injury by leaving us our first ever negative.

I have not been able to get any response out of eBay on our Fraud charges. Time will tell as to whether anything will be done by eBay. The 30-days for the processing of the formal Fraud complaint will be up on 9/11. But the feedback process is still a decent resource.

This fortunately is the only negative experience I have had on eBay until the week that my father passed away.

When we went from Pennsylvania to Ohio to take care of my father's funeral and affairs, we made arrangements with our ISP to send emails to and receive emails from our customers remotely from my brothers computer. Unfortunately, the system has not evidentally been fine tuned and we did not get a few emails and many of our's did not get out to our customers. We did not realize this until we returned home 7 days later. We also set up our telephone to answer it remotely. It is a new phone and we didn't do it right, so it didn't work for us and we were in such a hurry to get to Ohio, we forgot to give our neighbors the keys to get in and fix it for us.

Well, we got home and two of our customers had gone beseark. We had two phone messages and numerous emails calling us everything but legit. We called them immediately and got nothing more than a response of "Well things happen." from one and "you should have made better arrangements" from the other. One left negative feedback for us, but checked the positive box. So we decided just to leave it alone.

So, let me try to draw my bottom line. My concern is . . . . Yes, there are sellers out there that are not to be trusted. But these two folks that are so upset with us could ruin our good reputation (one that we have worked very, very hard to maintain) if they were to post their thoughts on a forum such as this. And I don't think it matters that we have bent over backwards to rememdy things. They feel they are right. They saw our lack of response as our refusing to sell to them. It does not matter to them that we thought we had covered all our contingencies.

Let the feedback system on eBay work for you. It is amazing to me how many people I see that are still bidding on the auctions of our scammer with a closed feedback and showing 7 negatives.

My brother learned his lesson the hard way. He bid on an auction where the seller had 78 negatives and he got burnt, but he did not take the time to check the feedback rating. He does now. And it seems to me if a person has to lock you out from their feedback, that at least puts up a red flag for me and you can still see how many positives, neutrals and negatives they have. Caveat Emptor is right. Use the system and if you get burned, try your best to resolve it within a reasonable time, then DO post a negative if it is unresolved. Ebay is the place to do this, not on the Forum.

I genuinely believe that all of you who posted under this thread mean well, but please be very careful. Believe me, I'd like to stop the scammer that burned me, but please do it in the appropriate place, where they can respond and hopefully clean up their act or be stopped.

What if I was selling Fontanini to these two people who got so upset with me and they posted something about me on the Fontanini Forum. I might never know and my business that I have worked so hard to maintain, could be seriously damaged.

Karen



[This message has been edited by Michael and Karen Power (edited 09-01-99).]