[ctownboy]

Honestly, what does B & L, REA, Legendary, Heritage or ANY other auction company have to do with THIS discussion? Those are privately owned companies that put together their OWN auction. They accept or reject items for THEIR OWN AUCTION and they also put forth a set of rules that BOTH buyers AND sellers have to abide by.

Plain and simple, if any of those companies DO NOT LIKE an item, they DO NOT HAVE TO accept it for THEIR auction. The SAME goes for a buyer OR a seller that doesn't like the rules those companies have in place. If they don't like the rules, they don't have to submit items for acceptance or they don't have to bid in the auction.

On the other hand, eBay (including PayPal) is a large, publicly owned company that only HOSTS auctions. For the most part, they do not have a say in WHAT is put up for auction by individual sellers. Also, since they are only the host and say they keep out of the actual selling of items, they have rules for how they will handle disagreements between buyers and sellers.

One of those RULES is that if a buyer has a problem with an item they bought or a seller, they can bring that problem to eBay's (or PayPal's) attention and eBay (PayPal) will make a judgement on THAT particular problem.

What this all means is that it doesn't make a difference if a seller states one time, ten times or a thousand times that there wil be NO REFUNDS. If eBay (PayPal) decides there WILL be a refund given, then there WILL be a refund given (if the buyer follows the rules eBay/PayPal say they have to follow).

As a seller on eBay, I don't like a lot of things they do, however one thing I have to remember is what eBay says, goes. If I don't like it, tough cookies.

A few years ago, I listed a vintage watch for auction and used a certain term, "tank" to describe it. Two days later, eBay removed my listing. The reason? The term I used to describe the watch (tank) was copyrighted by another watch company and only watches made by THAT company could be described with that term.

Once I found out what the problem was, I relisted the watch WITHOUT that term and eBay let my auction go through to completion.

In the last month, I have sold four dinner plates and a piece of pottery (in two seperate auctions and amongst numerous auctions). When the buyer received the dinner plates she said one of them was broken in transit. What did I do? I apologized for the problem (even though I had doubts it was true because I wrapped each plate in bubble wrap, put plenty of newspaper around all of the plates and then put them in an oversized box) and then divided the final selling price by four and refunded her that 1/4th. The result? No further complaints and NO negative Feed back.

As for the piece of pottery, it sold for 20 times more than I paid for it. I was thrilled and was already thinking how that would cover a month and half of my minimum credit card payment. Then, after the buyer received the piece of pottery, they E mailed me and told me there was a hairline crack in the piece that I didn't describe and they wanted to send it back for a refund.

They said they understood why I hadn't listed the crack as a defect in my auction (the crack was visable from inside the piece of pottery and could not be felt on the outside. They also said they could tell the crack was old because of the browning of the area where it was located). But that didn't matter because they didn't want a damaged piece of pottery in their collection.

What did I do? I had them send the piece back to me and once I had it in hand, I refunded ALL of their money. I did NOT like doing that BUT they have not complained and they have NOT left me negative Feed Back.

Moral of the story? The seller of THIS card might not like the fact they are going to have to refund the money to the buyer (especially if they ARE shilling their other auctions and actually sold this card to a person other than theirselves). They might not like the fact that the buyer sent the card to another grading company for evaluation BUT refunding the money is the right thing to do AND if they had done this in the beginning, they wouldn't be getting all of this bad press now.

David