disappointedOn May 6th I ordered a DVD box set from a seller on ebay. It was a Buy It Now, so I bought and paid for it right then and there. Within 12 hours I had an email from the seller saying thanks for the payment and my item was on its way. It sounded all good at the time. I sat back and prepared to wait 2 weeks, because that's the average time it takes for stuff to get to me.
Two weeks go by. Nothing. Then three weeks, then four. I send an email to the seller asking him to confirm when he shipped my DVDs, and to confirm which address he shipped them to, just to make sure. I get no answer. But it's happened before that sellers didn't get my emails, so I give him the benefit of the doubt and a few days later I send a message through ebay. Another few days go by and still no answer. I send another email. By this time I'm getting both worried and annoyed. Tomorrow will be 6 weeks since I paid for the DVDs and he said they were shipped.
On a gut feeling that this won't end well, I open the emails ebay sent me when I made the purchase. I always keep them until the item arrives just in case something like this ever happens. I click on the item description, but I get a message saying the listing has been removed. It has not been 90 days since I bought the item. It should still be there. I click on the "contact seller" link I just used about a week ago to contact him, and lo and behold, this seller is no longer a registered ebay member. Not only that, he has had over FOUR HUNDRED negative feedback comments in the past month. His feedback when I bought the DVDs was almost 100% positive. WTF?
Seeing that was enough to make me file a dispute with Paypal then and there. I tried being nice about it, contacting him three times and waiting patiently for my DVDs, but now I'm sure I'll never see them. :( I should've just paid the full retail price (twice what I paid on ebay) and bought the DVDs in the store. I'll be doing that in the future to avoid this hassle.
ETA: Because of what I've heard before about Paypal and what some people posted in the comments, I just phoned my knight in shiny plastic armor, Visa (I paid by Visa through Paypal), to see if they could do anything to help me if the Paypal dispute goes down the toilet. The nice Visa man assured me they would refund my money if it came to that. Needless to say this makes me feel better.