eBay Italy is stealing my money! With a longer backstory, sorry... | Members help members

aus-meiner-sammlung · 2026-03-05T15:49:14.447000Z

Hello everyone!NOW I can see which account I’m writing from here (well, not actually, and I’m really logged in with a different one anyway, but whatever), but that’s not what this is about now, whether I’m “actually still” private or commercial. So I’d ask that we not start that discussion now. I was commercially active here for several years from 2003 and I’ll be again. The tax office has my data; they’ve been sent it multiple times by eBay lately anyway (legal situation since 2023, “more than 30 items a year etc.”. The state has to get the money back somehow, after all, which has been thrown around the world here in the billions for years), there’s a dormant business registered with the tax office, etc. Background first, then to the topic:I’m currently having some problems with shipping providers abroad. UPS was not able to send a package to Miami and after it came back twice, it then - after some difficulties - went successfully with DHL, but UPS no longer replies/answers and my shipping costs (€47) are gone. Once UPS, never UPS again.DHL destroyed one of my shipments (the first shipment in 26 years! I pack “fairly securely,” let’s put it that way) and is pinning the blame on me because I supposedly packed it wrong (which they checked when the parcel had already been sitting around at my place again for 2 weeks, cool). My shipments do not “get” damaged, as 26 years of safe shipping show, end of story.Hermes forwarded 2 shipments - and that’s almost exactly the topic, sorry - to Italy via their subcontractor HR-Parcel and one has allegedly been in Milan since 19/12/2025, and with shipment tracking (there are 3: the one from eBay/Hermes, Hermes, and HR-Parcel) it is at the same time in Italy and Germany, but nobody knows where it is. But Hermes says it’s being sent back - catastrophic service on the phone, the same employee twice in 2 weeks, the “same” promises (in hard-to-understand German), as I told him, too, and NO idea - I recognized him immediately from all that, so the shipment has been gone for almost 3 months now. No money back, because it is “still on its way to me, which can take some time”; if it were GONE, I could apply for a refund, but only after 30 days at the earliest (does anyone know Tom Hanks’s laugh in “A League of Their Own” in the bath-through-the-ceiling scene?), alright then, and if I want a refund online, I always end up stuck with my “wrong” IBAN (according to Hermes), so Hermes knows my IBAN better than I do, great.Now, after one novel, straight into the next and finally the title topic:The second shipment came back once (it was stored 600 km away from my customer in the wrong place) and I sent it again to Italy with a Hermes shipping voucher and of course a NEW tracking number. It AGAIN ended up exactly in the wrong place, this time 500 km away from the customer - we’re getting closer to the destination...I’m still dealing with both cases because I’d like my customers to be satisfied and not lose any money, and with one of them I’ve been in contact every 3-5 days - since mid-December!Now, according to HR-Parcel, the parcel was delivered on 03/02/2026, my customer had opened a case (after discussing it with me), but he just wrote to me that the parcel is not with him in Spoleto, but somewhere else. eBay Germany says, all clear, you have no problem. Private sale (as is well known, BGB §447 etc. applies), risk passes to the customer, blah blah blah...eBay Italy sees it differently. Yesterday I received an email from Italy after I had spoken to eBay Germany several times (the gist at eBay.de after the most recent phone call: “We can’t do anything!”), and in this email a young lady from eBay.it writes to me, after the usual opening “Thank you for using eBay”... blah blah, roughly:“The shipment was delivered to the customer on 03/02/2026 and we will now also refund him the purchase price. This decision cannot be reversed!”Is it really the case on eBay in Italy that you sell items, then refund the money and effectively give the customer the goods?Seriously, what is going on here? I mean, the laws here unfortunately don’t count as much in some respects anymore, as you keep hearing, but BGB §447 is GERMAN law—what does eBay.it have to say about that, and why is eBay.de backing down? €143.00 and the goods are gone. The customer has already received the refund, as he wrote to me last night, and on my eBay page it naturally says, “You have issued the refund!” NO, I HAVEN’T!!!What advice do I get from Italy (the young lady, probably not even as old as I’ve been active on eBay)? She writes that so this doesn’t happen again in future, I should:a. Always state how high the expected shipping costs are and how long the shipment is likely to take. (sure, that’ll help, apart from the fact that I’ve been doing that for 23 years on eBay)b. I should always use a shipping company and insured shipping that offers tracking (not everyone is the sharpest tool in the box. How did they figure out in Italy that the goods were supposedly delivered by whom and when? Maybe with a tracking number?)c. I should always provide that tracking number too in case a case is ever opened (I thought it COULDN’T possibly happen again if I follow a + b?!) So, my goods are gone, Hermes is more than scarce, doesn’t help even remotely, apart from ONE email per month saying “We are sorry that you haven’t heard from us for so long....”, eBay.de says, “our hands are tied” (on the lines of, German law doesn’t count in Germany when you sell abroad) and eBay.it can access MY GERMAN eBay account and steal my money from me. It was debited yesterday and I couldn’t do anything about it because the current incoming payments hadn’t been released yet. I reconcile my incoming payments several times a week (since everything goes to eBay after a sale, it’s, as we know, become more difficult. Back then I looked at my bank account and knew what was what. Here I don’t know, and eBay is all too happy to side with the customer, who suddenly, meaning on average 15 minutes to half a day after buying, remembers that he didn’t actually want to buy the item, or can get it cheaper elsewhere. That happened more than once and I was left holding the bag), because I need the money and am trying to make a fresh start here as a small business. We all have obligations...So, long story, but I think all points are important. Has anyone ever experienced something like this and got a tip on what I can do?It feels to me again like: “Let’s just do it this way, eventually he’ll give up...”.No, eBay, I never have!

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eBay Italy is stealing my money! With a longer backstory, sorry... | Members help members | eBay Germany