My love/hate relationship with Ebay…

Ebay can be great, you can find that elusive bargain, that useless bit of crap, or that last item you needed to fill your collection. For wargamers, it can be a mecca of a site to find deleted or OOP minis or whatnot.

I both buy and sell on Ebay, and for the most part its pretty plain sailing. I have had a couple of people in the 7+ years i’ve been on there flake on me, but whatever. I’m a pretty easy going chap, and i’ll always strive to be a quick and efficient seller, and always pay promptly when i’m a buyer, usually as soon as the auction ends. I suppose I expect the same of other people, but alas it is not to be.

I found a back issue of White Dwarf magazine on there that had a cool illustration of a Battle Sister on the cover, and apparently had SoB tactics in one of the articles, so I went in for the kill. I won the auction, paid promptly and waited patiently.

You can imagine my surprise when I received a brown envelope in the mail a week or so later. I wasn’t sure what it was, as it was quite light, and had no return address on it. Seeing the UK postage mark on it, I thought it was something from my dad. I flipped over the envelope only to found out it was open, and empty. I was still baffled as to what it was when I saw that it was mailed from Leicestershire, then I knew that this was (at least once) home to my WD issue I’d won.

A mixture of wonderment and anger as to wtf had happened, obviously someone had helped themselves to my magazine, maybe thinking it was a Hustler or something, then just disgarding it when they found out otherwise. I’m not too sure how many wargames enthusiasts work for the PO, and any that did, the chance of them opening my item and thinking freakin’ xmas had come early. I did notice that it was one of those envelopes that has that tacky stuff under the lip, so you just squeeze it shut. The problem with these is that you can open them and reseal them with no problem. The seller hadn’t even bothered to seal an envelope with tape for an international sale!

So, long story short, I took some pictures right away and contacted the seller who was vague at best about what to do. So, after 3 attempts I decided, ‘no more mr nice guy’ and i’m currently slogging it out with PayPal to get my moolah back, as the sellers irresponsibility had left me without a magazine and down some cash. We’ll see what happens.

On the plus side, I did just score a Tomb Kings Screaming Skull catapult for less than 50% retail price – take THAT Games Workshop and your ever inflating prices! 🙂