Trepidation

In the middle of last month, I made a purchase on Ebay for a 60G iPod because my 20G iPod was really not serving its purpose anymore. I bought it second hand in the first place and after many repeated listenings, I found that it is far superior to any other form of portable disc player. Since I listen to such a huge variety of music - English, Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese and some French and Latin, I started finding that I had to start deleting songs from the iPod so that I can fit the new songs in.

I don't usually have any problems with purchasing on Ebay which is why I proceeded with this purchase, seeing that the seller was a power seller with many positive comments. I paid for the purchase and after a week, did not receive any payment confirmation from the seller. I emailed him and asked him if he has received it and he said that due to some problems at Ebay, his account was suspended, but it was not his fault, he reassured.

I waited for another week before I confronted him again and he said it was going to be fixed in the matter of days. After more waiting, I was not only frightened but frustrated, so I wrote and said that his problem with Ebay really had nothing to do with me since I had paid for the item I purchased, so I should be shipped my iPod. He wrote back apologetically and said that it would arrive in 7 days. That was about 2 weeks ago. After waiting a day with no response to my upset email, he wrote back today to say that Apple was having some problems with supplying the 60G iPod because it has been discontinued, and would offer a free upgrade to 80G at no extra charge because of the blunder.

He also said it will arrive on Thursday. I later found out that it meant arriving to him on Thursday instead of me. I am a little miffed about this purchase because of the amount of money involved and even though he has been very polite, rather prompt and professional with his replies, I still can't help feeling cheated.

I am now praying that it will arrive eventually but I just don't know how much I will trust buying on Ebay for expensive items like this again. Why didn't Ebay inform me that there was going to be some problems with the seller if they were going to drop him? Why did he only tell me that there was a problem with supply only after I sent another email that it has not been delivered?

I "used to" work in the ecommerce industry which gave me the confidence to purchase online but this has rocked me a little. So, has anyone else had similar experiences? What should I do if it doesn't come through?