We normally use this email list to advertise our specials on Ebay as well as our website. We wanted to take the opportunity to explain a situation that has affected us and may have caused some of you concern, and we think you will be very interested in what happened.
Some of you may have received an email from Ebay stating that our listings on our Ebay User ID Mikescoins1 were cancelled. You would only receive this email if you had bought from an active listing, however, since some of our listings are Ebay store listings you may have received an email from orders as old as six months ago. Because of this we felt it was neccessary to let everyone on this list know about the situation as soon as possible as the amount of time it would take to determine who actually received this email from Ebay might take days. As you can imagine, we have received some emails from customers worried that they will lose their money or otherwise not get their coins.
We think you will be interested to learn the reasons behind this, and we encourage you to read the rest of this email, but first and foremost -- rest assured that absolutely everyone who has an active paid order will promptly receive their order. The majority of people who received the email have already received their order. Please do not panic and put chargebacks through your credit card or Paypal complaints as there is nothing to be concerned about.
Now, let us explain what happened. If you are an Ebay seller as well, or if you use Paypal you might be especially interested.
Back in April, we had an international transaction with a company in New Zealand for $6,000 in silver coins through our website where the buyer paid by Paypal. We shipped the order according to Paypal's seller protection standards and also insured the package through our private insurance company. The package took about two weeks to arrive, which is normal for an international transaction. The US Postal Service and New Zealand Post both confirmed delivery, however, New Zealand Post did not get the requested signature confirmation that should have been obtained by the delivering postal employee working at New Zealand Post.
The day after we confirmed receipt, the buyer put a Paypal dispute in claiming non-receipt. As you may know, Paypal finds sellers guilty until proven innocent in these cases and the money was instantly removed from our account. In the comments section, the buyer stated that "the tracking number you provided does not confirm delivery". This was especially interesting considering this was before we were providing tracking numbers to international customers, so unless the buyer had the package right in front of them they would have had no way of knowing what the tracking number was.
We submitted to Paypal a screenshot of the USPS website showing that the package was delivered, a screenshot of the New Zealand Post website showing that the package was delivered, a letter from the USPS Inspection Service showing that after an investigation they determined the package was delivered to the addressee, and a letter from the New Zealand Post equivalent to the Inspection Service stating the same thing. Despite receiving all of this information, Paypal failed to render a decision in either my favor or the buyer's favor for three weeks on this case.
The buyer then instigated a chargeback with their credit card company since he failed to get a refund. The buyer also put a chargeback through on another earlier transaction claiming non-receipt that the buyer confirmed to me he received before putting in the $6,000 transaction. It is unclear if Paypal submitted the information to the credit card company to fight the chargeback on my behalf, or they failed to do so, as they have given me conflicting information, but nevertheless we lost the chargeback and we are permanently out $6,000. Our insurance company also would not cover the claim as they believe it was a case of buyer fraud and we can't really blame them for their conclusion.
Now -- to add insult to injury, Paypal froze our account with no explanation during the first week of July. Some of you may have been inconvienenced by this as you were unable to send payments. It took intervention by an Ebay executive that we met at Ebay Live to unfreeze the account. During this whole week, we had no concrete reasons from Paypal to determine the cause of this, except vague information from my Ebay/Paypal account manager Adam (who is the only Ebay/Paypal employee that has gone out of his way to try to help us through these issues) that it was due to a high Paypal complaint rate.
We thought the problems were over as the account was fully restored, but while we were on vacation out of the country in late July, the same thing happened, again with no explanation. When we returned, we eventually conferenced with a Paypal "risk specialist" who informed us that the reason behind these restrictions was a high chargeback rate. We explained the situation about the fraudulent New Zealand buyer and while the account was partially restored, a 5% / 120 day reserve was put on our account which wouldn't be so bad, except that the 5% was placed on ALL activity, including refunds, (which makes absolutely no sense) so if we issued a refund to a buyer, an additional 5% was placed into an reserve, resulting in 100% getting returned to the buyer and 5% put in reserve for a total loss of 105% of our money.
Now -- to the reason for the listing cancellations by Ebay. Ebay has now, effective Monday, instituted Paypal performance as a part to help determine Ebay seller performance. This is patently unfair as sellers that don't accept Paypal are not affected by this change, but those who do can only be negatively affected by this change. While we have had some negative feedbacks that added this "seller non-perfomance" rate, what caused the listings to cancel apparently was a poor Paypal chargeback rate, most of which was due to this $6,000 chargeback. Mind you, this is a company that we have paid over $200,000 in fees to just in the past two years have done over $2,000,000 in business with and we never experienced a problem like this before.
Aside from our horrible experience, in general Ebay and Paypal as many of you know have gone through a period of dramatic and tumultuous change with numerous rapid management and policy changes since the beginning of this year. Needless to say, it appears that Ebay is no longer a reliable venue for our sales and regardless of what eventually happens with this situation, our Ebay auctions will become a smaller part of our business, if they have any part at all, by the end of this year.
We do have two other Ebay User IDs that we have used as backups and have many of the same listings we normally have on our Mikescoins1. Both of these user IDs have "raised" search standing due to excellent customer service and we were already planning to list more on them before this issue occurred. To see these listings, please click on the links below:
Walruscoins Ebay Store
Mikescoins2 Ebay Store
Please also take a look at our website, www.mikescoins.com. We will be expanding our website listings and lowering prices soon as well. If there is anything that is listed that is a silver item, we can probably give you a better price on the coins as the prices on the site do not reflect the recent drop in silver. Please email us with any questions.
And, if you have any other questions or want to comment on what happened, we invite you email us directly at support@mikescoins.com. We thank you for reading this and appreciate your support during this disruption.
Sincerely,
Mike's Coins]]>
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