One thought on “Sterling And Mother Of Pearl Ladies Letter Opener”

  1. I think the dispute is over and I can talk about it a little.

    The buyer of this Thing sent me a little gripe:

    This is new from china not sterling not old.
    Refund please

    Not a lot to go on, but I get the idea and really wonder if she has the right guy and communicate that to my partner who sourced the item, wrote the description and handled the payment.

    I tell her wow I’m sorry I’ll take care of it but I want to ask my partner a couple of questions (mostly about the China part).

    I think about it for a second and I send her a second message wondering about the China part. I may not be the President Of Antiques yet, but this Thing IS sterling, is antique, and is not from China.

    That gets the SNAD (Significantly Not As Described) claim at PayPal. Ordinarily, claims at PP are used as a last resort but this time it’s the buyer’s answer to my question.

    Partner says fine, send it back, refund when the tracking says it gets here.

    It comes back and it’s a different letter opener. Antique dealers don’t like that. Partner files an appeal to the PP refund that’s executed when the tracking is reported to them.

    I poke around in the Powersellers forum with some particulars and somebody suggests I look for her similar purchases from other sellers and lo and behold, there’s the one with the nick that my partner described on our returned wrong Thing.

    She IS mad at the wrong guy. Too bad we didn’t get to talk about it.

    I surround her with evidence via email and ebay messages and ask real nice about some sort of solution here. I email my partner that I feel she’ll see reason……

    I go to bed. I live for that.

    The next morning, today, he informs me the appeal is automatically denied. I wait throughout the day and think maybe she’ll answer me, but by end-of-auctions time tonight, nada.

    So I call PayPal.

    What-the-hell.

    They take a look at my stuff and say yeah, you’re right, looks like we should un-reverse the reversal. We’ll do that.

    This is a semi-crazy way to fail to make a living. If we don’t go through a round of re-re-re tomorrow, it looks like the only problem here is that we have some other guy’s letter opener. We don’t care whether or not it came from China, it looks like the sterling in it probably has enough scrap value to pretend like we got some salvage.

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