It's Christmas, when billions of dollars are spent ordering gifts for the season. With all that money being tossed around, we can be assured that people with marginal morals will be out there trying to take advantage. And no one does that better than the Chinese.
The picture at the right, from the actual online ad, is quite clear as to the basic look of the product; trust me, it actually did look a lot like sea glass even though it wasn't supposed to be sea glass, or have the recipient believe it was sea glass.
Oh yeah, also ... "American made", the company advertised, from an "American company." It sounded good, the price was right, and the product was a perfect gift for her friends. So she ordered six of them, for a total of $122.97. Since they took PayPal, we used that, and awaited the order.
As the picture at the left suggests, what we received was not exactly a "sea-glass" tree, and you'll have to take my word for it that it wasn't near twelve inches high. What it was, was an eight-inch high cheap clear plastic tree that must have cost all of four cents to make, whatever that might be in yuan, since they were indeed shipped not from America but from China.
Now, I grant you that what we actually ordered wasn't expected to be a very high-quality product, so when I say "cheap" I'm not suggesting that we were expecting actual sea glass. But irrespective of that, it was not, in height, color and structure, what we ordered.
My best girl had a justifiable fit. So she looked up the customer service phone number for the "American" company she had ordered it from. Guess what she heard on the other end of the line? "We're sorry, this number is no longer in service ..."
Since we had paid via PayPal, and I handle the PayPal account, I said I'd put in the complaint. My younger son uses PayPal all the time, and swears by their customer service, so I went online and filed a complaint, and had it acknowledged as received. In their process, they carry the complaint to the seller to reply and offer a solution.
Sure enough, next morning I get a message from PayPal. At 2:00am, the seller, who was being open at this point about using their actual Chinese company name, had offered to refund an amount of $12, and we would not have to return the incorrect items. No offer to provide the correct products was made.
Got it? On a $122.97 order, the Chinese company was offering to refund less than 10% of the price we paid, and made no offer to provide the proper items. Naturally, I replied through PayPal that we would not accept that and required a full refund of our payment.
And of course, next morning there was another "offer" from the company -- they had upped their offer to $20. Now, how we were supposed to be expected to accept less than a sixth of what we paid to settle our claim, being allowed to keep a bunch of garbage that was nothing like what we ordered?
I wrote back essentially the same response via PayPal, that they could take their offer and place it gently where the sun doesn't shine, which at that point it was not shining since it was daytime here and they were, you know, in China.
Next day I got a message from PayPal that was a bit different. They had offered to refund the entire amount, but only if we sent the clear plastic trees back to China, on our nickel, no later than December 15th. The problem was that PayPal looked at that as a settling offer, and their online messaging did not give me an avenue to reject it.
Now, it was not what we had agreed to. In order to get our money back, not only would we have to ship the garbage back to China, and pay for it ourselves, but the Chinese company would have to acknowledge receipt by December 15th. And according to PayPal, if we didn't accept this within a week, they would drop the claim. But there was no actual message section for me to respond and reject that!
Do I trust that even if we shipped the garbage back, that the Chinese company would properly acknowledge receipt? Why would they? The same people who thought we'd accept $12 as a settlement could easily lie about receiving products back, and with no recourse. I was not going to put myself in a position to have to chase them down again.
I finally found a separate messaging channel to PayPal and sent a very loud message that we were not accepting that "solution" and wanted the full refund, no conditions. I wasn't sure even if they were going to get my message and link it with the case; after all, a lot of people use PayPal.
I know everything doesn't always work out the way it should. But in this case, about 36 hours later I got a message back from a lady at PayPal. They had looked quickly into the exchange of the previous few days, and then looked to see whether this Chinese outfit had a track record.
And of course they had; they had shipped enough incorrect product paid for via PayPal, and PayPal had had enough similar complaints, that they had decided to provide an unconditional refund, and in almost no time had gone ahead and credited our account the full amount of the purchase. Case closed.
There are several takeaways here, but primary among them is that when you are ordering from a company that portrays itself as American, and they are Chinese, there need to be penalties, and we need not to have to rely on PayPal to settle it. Chinese companies are China, friends, and the penalties need to be assessed toward China.
Because it ain't about Christmas trees.
Copyright 2020 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at
www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one
daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no
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welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton
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