I am sitting here typing on my laptop that sits on a chiller purchased on Ebay, an AC adapter and battery purchased on Ebay, wearing my headset purchased on Ebay. Occasionally I wear the headphones I purchased on Ebay and sync my PDA with a cable purchased on Ebay. I really like Ebay for buying electronic gadgets. So I wasn’t concerned about buying memory for my laptop. I knew what I needed and did a buy now on Ebay with confidence on RAM that I knew would work in my laptop. That was March 1.
The memory arrived March 6th from Atlanta Georgia (which was a little long considering it’s a 3 day first class mail distance and I paid for insurance and all that stuff). I eagerly turned off, unplugged, and removed the battery from my laptop and popped the old memory out and quickly inserted the new memory and fired up my laptop up to enjoy the 2 gigs of RAM that I was sure would breathe new speed into my laptop. The laptop did nothing. It just sat there with no screen whatsoever. I removed the memory and reseated it. Nothing. I put the old memory back in and fired the laptop up and everything came on like magic. Then I removed that memory once again and put in 1 chip. The laptop cycled through the POST several times, so I started it back up and it froze on the POST screen. OK, now I’m getting a bit perturbed. I pop in the other new chip and the machine fires up with no problem. So I take a look at both chips and neither chip is the chip I bid on and paid for and they are not a matched set as indicated on Ebay (assuming that quantity of 2 means 2 of the same). So I email the seller. I hear nothing. So I call the seller and they offer to replace the chips for Kingston in the type that will work on my laptop. So I repackage the chips and mail them back on March 8 as I have missed the cut off on getting mail out on the 7th. March 15th arrives and I’ve still heard nothing, so I call again and get the voicemail and leave messages and email and hear nothing until later in the day when I get a mass email that states the shipment will go out on Friday, March 16. I have just emailed and the seller assures me the RAM went out on March 16, so I’m in a holding pattern again. I hope to get the memory today so I can be done with this transaction.
Ironically, this ebay seller has a 99.1% positive rating. Now my calculations are a bit different in that out of 2732 transactions in the last month, 23 were neutral and 31 were negative, which comes out to 80.24% positive rating. Nearly every neutral and negative rating had to do with mailing the wrong thing in way too long a period of time. I took that into account when I bid because how hard can it be to put the 2 sticks of RAM I bid on into an anti-static bag, slip it in bubble wrap bag, put it in a bubble mailer, and slap a label with first class postage printed on it? Most people who do the volume this business supposedly does should have that process down by now. But I was wrong and became one of the 19.76% who did not have a good experience.
I have to wonder whether they would have mailed it on Friday had I not been a squeaky wheel. Will I do business with them again. Heck no. Will I recommend them to anyone else? Uh, no.
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