Seth Kinast’s Blog

I bought a SteelPad S&S a couple months ago on eBay. If you follow the link, you’ll see it’s a pretty sweet hard plastic pad with a rubber grippy on the underside to keep it from moving. It’s subtle yet nice-looking, and feels great to use.

It seemed to be a good deal, the seller had good feedback, and the pad was just what I wanted. A perfect auction. Then I got the package in the mail.

Unlike the auction description, the pad was not ***NEW***. There was no packaging… or slipcase… or padsurfers (little Teflon feet for your mouse)! Even worse, there was a giant “Intel Pentium 4″ logo prominently displayed on the bottom right corner! Seeing as how everything I have is AMD, this definitely was not a value-added aesthetic.

Here’s what was advertised:
And here’s what I got:

I figured it was just a misunderstanding, so I e-mailed the seller to let him know…

…but it was intentional! The seller replied with a long discourse on how he didn’t say the auction included the other items so they were not included.

Hello Seth, First I must explain to you that by bidding on my auction, you agreed to the item description. The item description states: “You are bidding on a new premium gaming mousepad: Steelpad S&S.” You received this Steelpad S&S exactly as it was described to you and were not promised any additional SteelPad accessories.
[...]
This dispute is not a result of my inadequate item description, but your inability to contact a seller before bidding on their item and being unsatisfied despite receiving the item exactly as it was describe[d.]

Nope, bad move. He said the pad was new (which obviously implies in the packaging) and called it a SteelPad S&S (which is clearly listed to come with accessories on the manufacturer’s site). He also conveniently failed to mention the giant ugly Intel logo on it, instead excusing himself with:

The reason the picture of my auction was not a picture of the actual item is because I did not have a camera on-hand and opted to use a picture from the SteelPad site.

I wish everything in life worked that way. I didn’t want to have to actually do my homework, so I just took a picture of someone else’s and turned it in. Sweet.

Since the guy was obviously going to be uncooperative, it was time to bring in PayPal. I went through the (rather long) dispute process, and faxed 6 pages of documentation to PayPal directly. Less than a day later, I got an e-mail back that my dispute was decided in my favor, and that I could send the item to PayPal for a full refund. Honestly it’s not that much money, but it feels great to stick it to a dishonest seller.

I’m actually giving him one more chance though

Hi Brian,

If you have been watching the PayPal dispute, you will have seen that PayPal agreed with me that the item was misrepresented. They will be refunding my money as soon as I ship the item to them.

I wanted to give you the opportunity to refund my money in full before PayPal closes the dispute in my favor. This will allow you to avoid the $20 dispute resolution fee and the negative feedback I am going to leave.

If I don’t hear from you in the next couple days I’ll go ahead and proceed with shipping the item to PayPal, so no reply is necessary if you don’t wish to refund my payment in full.

The negative feedback I will be leaving is: Received a not-new item not as pictured. Had to dispute via PP and won a refund.

If you refund my money, I will leave the following positive feedback: Item was not as described but I was eventually offered a full refund.

Thanks,
Seth

We’ll see what happens…