I believe in good customer service. I believe that when you make a little boo-boo or someone ends up not being particularly happy with the items or prices, you do what you can to make it better. I give the occasional refund, I hold the occasional hand when a package seems awfully late, I make occasional returns when I mess up. It's just what good sellers do.

Recently, I bought an item on eBay. The price was one cent, with a shipping charge of $49.99. Now, I personally dislike sellers who so blatantly avoid paying their rightful fees by charging exorbitant shipping on a one-cent item. They only pay fees on the penny, but they get the entire $50. (Apparently there is some talk that eBay might soon start charging fees for the entire amount, including shipping, which will even out the playing field between honest sellers who pay their rightful fees and the dishonest ones who make their fee-free profit through shipping.) But this was an item I really wanted, so I bucked up and paid.

A while later, I got the item, and there was a small part that was damaged, rendering the item unusable. I wrote and asked if I could exchange it, and they gave me the address to send it back. I shipped it back to them at my expense (nearly $10), and waited for my replacement.

The replacement came, and it had the EXACT same thing wrong with it! I was really disappointed in the item and in the seller. I wrote to ask if I could just get my money back entirely. I certainly didn't want to spend another $10 to ship back the same defective item, only to risk having them send ANOTHER defective item. I asked for my full refund, plus the initial $10 I had spent sending the first bad one back to them, seeing as how my shipping it back didn't solve the problem. They gave me the address and said they would cheerfully refund my money when they received the item.

A while goes by, then I get my PayPal refund. The refund was for ONE CENT. When I asked what was up, they pointed me to the fine print in the auction, where it said, "We cheerfully refund on all purchases if you are not satisfied. Shipping & handling is non-refundable."

So now I am out the original fifty bucks I paid PLUS an additional $20 for the two times I shipped it back, and I still have no product! I was completely fed up and just asked to have the stupid thing sent back to me. I could sell it as a non-working display item and make some of my money back, or maybe give it to a local theatre for a prop, or something else that was marginally worthwhile. They agreed to send it back, but of course, I would have to "...please remit shipping of $49.99..."

Seriously, what kind of customer service is this? How can people get away with this? (I filed a PayPal investigation, but since they had already "refunded," it was denied.) eBay wants so badly for us to believe that any trading outside of eBay is unsafe, and yet the only two times I have been burned in transactions was through eBay. They won't do anything about it because they will say I should have read the fine print, and the fact that the both items were defective is my word against the seller's. The seller has a feedback rating of over 4000 (I can't imagine how, with ethics like that), whereas the account on which I was buying was less than 100. Who is eBay going to believe?

It's times like this that just make me want to redouble my efforts at good customer service. My packages have been going out a little quicker than usual these days, and when one customer recently bought something that was no longer in stock, I made up for it by including a few freebies for her. None of this is going to get my $70 back from that awful seller, but at least I will have the knowledge that *I* am not leaving "MY" customers in the terrible position I am now in.