I left negative feedback on ebay for dropshipping and the seller has messaged me four days in a row asking me to change it
The seller in question was selling items they didn't have at a nearly 50% markup.
My wife bought a Keurig coffee maker on Amazon for a Christmas gift. When it arrived, the box was mailed directly from JCPenny.com. I looked on their website and the coffee maker was $35 cheaper. We learned our lessons about dropshipping and only looking at Amazon for products.
Keep fighting the good fight OP!
I think I'm gonna wait a few days before telling them no. Or maybe just not respond. I'm sure as hell not changing or removing my negative feedback. Clearly my review is worth more to them than the cost of the item.
Just take the item and run. Underhanded tactics deserve underhanded tactics
Amazon hasn't been the cheapest for things in a long time. There's a few segments where they are competitive, but it's generally only small things that are cheaper to ship. The more people that learn this the better.
There was a time when you could have kitty litter delivered to your home for less than it cost at a local store, but that hasn't been the case for a almost a decade.
Yeah, whereas I used to have dog food shipped from Amazon because it was cheap and convenient, now I pretty much only do it for the convenience, because it's priced the same as Petsmart and Petco.
Small items have the shipping bulit in, so there's nothing useful under $10
So you returned it and re-bought it from jcpenney.com, right?
Nah, it was a last-minute gift for her mom, and my wife didn't want to go empty-handed. The bad guys won that day.
I'm out of the loop, what's drop shipping and why is it bad?
Basically the way it usually works is.
Chinese knock off mass factory, makes stores and has the items.
They find a guy in America and say "Hey can you list our items on ebay, when you sell them, we'll take $20, you can probably sell them for $50.
Guy lists item for $50, someone buys it, he then just e-mails the dropshipper and asks them to send it straight to the buyer. Sometimes he will have to give ebay a fake tracking number (because ebay doesn't approve the practice).
Point is the drop shipper is just there to conceal the actual source of the product. That's generally because they are sketchy in some other way.
A co-worker of mine at one point got into a drop shipping scam. She was selling golf clubs that way (she was selling them about 80% of expected retail, place she was buying from was charging her about 25% of retail. She didn't know (but probably should have guessed) that the clubs she was selling were counterfeit, and she about had a heart attack when her 2nd customer called her out on it (she refunded him and took the loss).
Yes, and it's basically a given that most of this crap is counterfeit, unless it's a scheme as dopey as simply ordering it from Amazon and shipping it back to you. Which still isn't a guarantee that it isn't counterfeit, come to think of it.
That profit margin for the drop shipper has to come from somewhere.
And this is coming from someone who deliberately orders counterfeit crap. (Yes, knives, how did you guess?) But if you're okay with that you may as well buy it directly from whoever is making the knockoffs in the first place via Aliexpress or whatever and pay a lot less in the process.
To be a little more clear from what op said, it's when someone sells it from eBay to a person that didn't shop around to see if the product was cheaper from other retailers. The ebay seller than buys it from another retailer where the product was offered for less money and then the seller has it shipped from that retailer directly to the buyers house. It's bad in the sense of some eBay shoppers purposely want to avoid giving their money to a specific retailer (like amazon), or they just feel mad that they could have gotten the product cheaper to begin with.
I don't mind this personally with ebay, I might be out a few extra dollars sometimes but at least I am supporting independent sellers and not having to waste time visiting and put my info into many websites. If they are violating the terms of service of Amazon Walmart etc. to do so, great, I support that. If they are waiting for sales to get a better price, fine, I wouldn't want to bother with that myself.
If their lack of actually having the item resulted in me not getting it at all, I'd be a little pissed about it, but I haven't experienced that. Overall I like ebay way better than other e-retailers.
The other replies are a bit wrong.
The definition of dropshipping is that the seller / retailer does not have any stock of the product and instead orders the product from a supplier whenever a sale occurs.
Many have pointed out this usually occurs with middlemen and scalpers turning profit on goods available elsewhere for lower prices, but it also technically applies to print-on-demand and other manufactured at point of sale goods.
I'm assuming that there's no issue with print-on-demand and manufacture at POS; I know pretty much what I'm getting if I order a 3D printed dingus.
I had a seller try to pull this shit on Amazon a few years ago. I had bought a wrist rest for my keyboard, the one I'm tolerating at this very second in fact. Amazon's pages have a stark white background, the wrist rest was black. Even if details came through in the picture, the background of the page would wash it out. I wanted a simple straight wrist rest. This one has what I can only describe as a waist; the part your right hand would rest on is narrower and thus less supportive than the ends. I gave it a 3-star review stating such. The solution I've found is to turn it around so it's facing "backwards" and that puts the narrowest part in between my hands.
The seller emails me asking if there's anything they can do to make it right. So far, we're okay. I just say no, it's not worth bothering with on my end. They kept getting pushier about changing my review to 5 stars until I contacted Amazon about it.
Somewhere, be it Amazon themselves via the almighty algorithm, or the dropshippers themselves, there is a disconnect from reality. 5-star reviews carry no information, even if they are specific and detailed, the practice of paying or compensating for them is so common that you can just flush them down the toilet with the rest of the piss. It's the low end that carries the information. I have chosen to buy products based on their 1-star reviews.
For example, I'm invested in the Craftsman V20 power tool system. I went to buy the power inverter they sell for it, that lets you run normal electrical things off of drill batteries, has a NEMA15 socket and a couple USB ports on it. The negative reviews were mostly "Doesn't run my space heater. Would rate 0 stars if I could. Returned." I couldn't find a negative review of the product that didn't boil down to "I don't know what 150 watts max means." Not a problem with the product, it's a problem with people being ignorant. I bought, and am happy with, the tool.
On the other hand, I went to buy a pocket flashlight, I looked at the negative reviews and many of them said some variation on "tail switch broke after 4 or 5 months." Ah, this model has a common mode of early failure, I'll move on.
Honestly when I’m dubious of the quality of a product, I look for the negative reviews. If the only negative reviews are people clearly being dumb or really minor gripes, I take that as a good sign. If there are very few or no negative reviews, that’s a red flag that something fishy is going on.
I genuinely don't know if there's some Amazon policy or if they have an algorithm or whatever, or if people are just dumb enough to think anything other than 5 star reviews chase customers away.
A product with no negative reviews at all...you're telling me your QC is perfect, no one got a defective one, all of them survived shipping okay, it was never the wrong size or color, it perfectly met everyone's expectations, and none of your customers are pavement chewing morons?
Here's a mystery for you: Jorgensen's website. They sell carpentry clamps, plus an increasing line of hand tools. They've got a #4 smoothing plane that manages to be in the mid-range. You either get $20 pieces of useless shit from Harbor Freight, or $400 pieces of jewelry from Lie Nielson, and here comes Jorgensen with a $70 pretty okay plane. On their website, there's not even a section for reviews on the #4's page. They have announced a #5 jack plane, it's not out yet, there's a section for reviews there. With 5-star reviews "looking forward" to the product.
Idea cancer much?
Update the review with a screenshot of their begging.
Change your feedback, get the refund, and change it back.
This is underrated comment. XD
...
Yeah they send you a forum through ebay that allows you to change it. It doesn't work the way it does on Amazon.
This happened to me once but diff platform. I gave the seller 3 out of 5 stars. Seller messaged me with the same m.o. I changed the stars to 1 and attach the screenshot. Fuck them.
Update it to include being pestered by them to change to a positive review.
To being blackmailed into only receiving a refund if they change their review. I see nothing in there about them giving a refund if they don't change it first
Change the review, get the refund, change it to a one star and include conversation snippets regarding asking to change the review
One time on Amazon, I purchased an air conditioner. The model they sent was not the model I bought so I went for a refund and to send it back the to the seller.
The seller representative basically tried to spin it as though the model I received was actually better than what I had tried to buy.
I told him that I didn't care, it is not what I bought, that this "better model" is twice the width of what I wanted and it states in its manual that it needs to be on its own dedicated circuit.
The fucking guy kept this up over a few messages. I told him that if he didn't take it back, I would just charge back my credit card because this was clearly a bait and switch
The next message the guy sends, he says that me "threatening" him by saying I'll charge back the card is immoral of me, and makes an allegory equating it to murdering someone by shooting them.
At this point I contact amazon proper, and give them the entire message log. The amazon rep is fucking horrified and says that they will investigate the seller.
The fucking guy sends me a message telling me that I shouldn't talk to amazon, because my correspondence with them gets CC'd to him.
I forward that message to the amazon rep as well.
The guy loses his fucking shit, starts making guesses at where I live, what I do for work, a bunch of shit. He says that he has a double major in marketing for some reason.
I demand that I never have to interact with him again. In his last message to me he tells me not to leave a bad review as it is a family owned business.
I leave a lengthy and scathing review, noting that someone with a double major in marketing who acts like this must have wasted a lot of money on their post secondary education.
I get connected to someone else who isn't insane who in their first message sends me the slip to mail this fucking air conditioner back, and I get my refund.
I had an Amazon seller offer to send me a gift card if I changed my review so I said I would take the card but would probably only change my review to note the gift card offer.
Had that happen on Amazon and ebay multiple times
I always tell them I'll only increase it one star and the reason for the change will be the first thing anyone sees in the review, even above the original review.
So far I've only had one taker.
It's explicitly against Amazon's ToS to incentivize reviews, or write/modify reviews in exchange for any kind of compensation. This includes the typical business card included in the box with the product pleading for 5 stars and promising "free gifts" or store credits. When I still used Amazon, any time I got one of those it was the only thing I mentioned in my review.
I don't know if anyone actually meaningfully enforces this, but quite a few things I've reviewed in such a way seemed to disappear from the site more quickly than usual.
stay safe
Well, that doesn't feel vaguely threatening at all...
Let’s ALL buy the same thing as OP and then leave negative feedback. We’ll all get it for free and bleed this vendor.
Link, OP?
Nice try, vendor in question.
Maybe he found out after the fact?
Correct.
Are they not spamming 5 star reviews to the limit so that no new ones can be submitted anymore? Because that's also a thing they do with less effort.
Dropshipping itself isn't evil, it just means the retail orders from the supplier (sometimes the manufacturer) on demand, but scalping or other resellers are quite bad yes.
If someone wants to pay more for something, and is made aware they can purchase the item elsewhere for cheaper, and still wishes to then that's their prerogative. I don't like being cheated or mislead.
It's not evil, you're providing a service by offering the product in a more familar environment to people, but still it'd be good to be transparent about it rather than pretending you're the seller
This is for sure just an LLM running sentiment analysis on the reviews and sending this prewritten email to anyone who left a review it analyses as being negative.
They finally fucked off after enough time has passed for me to reverse feedback I think.
Not all heroes wear capes (unless you do, OP).
I wouldn't mind wearing a cape lol. Underrated fashion accessory.
Order one from him on ebay!