On Saturday I ordered a pretty expensive set of used golf clubs from a highly rated eBay seller in Florida. I had not used my eBay account in years (Lesson #1).
The original shipment heads up was sometime next week to my home in Pennsylvania. I got an e-mail yesterday telling me delivery via fedex was expected today.
My eyes nearly leapt from my skull when I saw where it was shipping…some hodgepodge address in Florida that made zero sense. A total mix up of numbers and punctuation. The city was in lower CAPS…it was indecipherable.
I immediately contact the seller to ask what was going on and they said that was my address. Looked at eBay setting and, sure enough, the mess was my preferred address.
6 or 8 messages to the Seller went unanswered. In the meantime, I looked up the address in Google maps and it didn’t register.
At 11:00 this morning I get a delivery notification from FedEx. Proof of shipments included a signature but no address.
Ther Sellers got back and said there was nothing they could do as they shipped to the address on file.
I opened disputes with my credit card company, eBay and FedEx.
I talked with the good folks at FedEx who told me to “delete the period and the slash, that’s where we delivered.” Looked it up on Maps and it’s a vacant lot. Great.
(This was after she insisted “we deliver to the address as listed”. When I pointed out that was not the case she hung up on me.). Lesson #2-FedEx, you’re dead to me.
eBay, after getting to the correct person, told me they would reach out to the Seller and if I didn’t get satisfaction from them to call eBay back and they would refund my money. Lesson #3-hope they weren’t lying to me!
In this whole mess I’m reminded of a couple of the biggest problems we sometimes face in this crazy world we’re living in:
- Nobody thinks anymore. The FedEx guy pulls up to a vacant lot in a major city and drops off a set of golf clubs to a random guy and there’s no wondering about this? The shipper doesn’t look at a label and go “Wow….that’s a really messed up address. Maybe I should reach out to the Buyer.”
- Companies don’t encourage their employees to think. See above.
- eBay was so casual about my account being hacked. How often does this happen? Lesson #4–change all your passwords, delete your CC info and wean yourself off social media.
Hoping for a happy outcome…although I really wanted those golf clubs.