False advertising on Ebay is rampant and allowed?
Is it possible that thousands of sellers on Ebay falsely advertising their wares? You bet it is. Is this allowed? You bet it is by Ebay’s rules.
By law this might not be legal because it is considered cheating or scamming people out of their money, but Ebay will not do anything against it other then helping refunding the buyer’s money if they file a dispute and return the item to the seller.
In reality Ebay is nothing more but an online corner store and have no legal power of any kind, only their internal rules. They do their best to keep their integrity, but not going to kill the goose that lays the golden egg especially when there are thousands of them.
If you go to the police with such matters they just brush you off telling you they can’t do anything because the amount doesn’t justify the effort (most Ebay stuff are less then a 100 Dollars or Pounds or Euros or what ever money you are using). Plus they can’t really do anything if the seller is in China.
Most scammers are from China. Selling anything under the sun. You have to watch out what you buy from them and who are you buying from, because you might think you will get what you have paid for, but you will easily get something just similar or something else as tens of thousands of buyers do.
Filing an Ebay dispute with a Chinese is not going to work out very well, because they just (the chinese) will play stupid in their correspondence, stalling and stretching time, wishing you well and blessing you a million times, speculating that sooner or later you’ll give up. Besides, the time difference of 11 hours aren’t going to help either. When you are awake they are asleep, so you are not going to have a speedy correspondence.
None of them want a negative feedback, but when it comes down to keep your money or send it back, they rather take the money and forget about the rest.
Large amount of feedback does not help either as many of them has feedback in the tens or hundreds of thousands that might be true might be false. What you need to read in their feedback is the neutral and negatives, because there are plenty of those. After you read someones feedback that has say 300 thousands with 2000 negative will give you the true nature of their honesty. So you can use your best judgement whether to buy or not from that chinese seller.
Just simply sending the item back is not an option, because they always deny ever receiving it back. The only option there might be if in your correspondence you demand that you want the refund upon providing Ebay/Paypal with the proof of postage. (Say, a registered parcel for an example) That way Paypal gives your money back and collect it back from the chinese.