Saturday Swagnote & Bug Bites part 3

Please bear with me Swagfriends! Saturdays post will be late, it's a very busy day! Check back in the afternoon / evening for Part 1 of the Special Offers Breakdown series! Until then, enjoy Fridays post, SwagShopping Bug Bites, Part 3! 

Good Morning Swaggernauts!

It's FRIDAY! Huzzah! Wow the week went quickly.. seems like  was just typing last Friday's blog. I can't remember the topic that day but I remember talking about Friday :P

Today's post is SwagShopping Bug Bites, part 3. There's been a lot of questions about Amazon Marketplace on the Swagbucks Facebook page lately. Seems like a good fit for this series!

What is Amazon Marketplace?

Amazon Marketplace is a way for vendors to sell through Amazon. Most often the items are used, refurbished, or collectible, but you can also buy new items through vendors. The advantage is of course the potential for lower prices, the drawback is the potential for a product that isn't up to the quality you expect. Or extremely long shipping. Having to go through a longer process to get a refund if there is a problem.

Links to Amazon Marketplace vendors are on the same page as the item description. The page will look something like this.

The price I highlighted in blue is the normal, new from Amazon price. For this iPod its $229.95 with free shipping from Amazon Prime. (I Signed up with Amazon Moms this morning out of curiosity, now all my items say Amazon Prime instead of Free Super Shipper Savings..  so I don't know if I will see any Free Super Shipper things anymore! Will investigate further Tomorrow!)

Below the Amazon price I've highlighted in yellow the Amazon Marketplace vendor links.

The prices shown are supposed to be the lowest, when you click the link it goes from lowest price to highest. Sometimes this link is not the actual lowest price though. In this case, there are 7 vendors selling new iPods, savings of around $5. (Check the shipping though!)  24 vendors are selling USED iPods of this model from $70.00 and up. 2 vendors are selling refurbished iPods from $94.99 and up. Just click the link that interests you and a page like this will open up.

This shows the prices & shipping on the left, then the expected condition of the item. Next comes the seller information, including name, rating, number of sales, and any extra information they want to share about the product (ie cables included, scratching on case but plays fine, etc.) Last come the Add To Cart buttons.

From there it works just like yesterday's post, except if you have stuff from Amazon & vendors, or multiple vendors, each shows as a different order (all listed on the same screen). This is so you know exactly how the shipping charges breakdown, expected delivery for each shipment, change things easier before you go to the payment screen.   Sorry I don't have a screenshot, next time I go shopping I'm sure I will :)

Usually everything goes according to plan, you get the package and it's just what you expected. Once in a while, though... you're bound to have something go wrong. What do you do when you have a vendor item that you have to return? If it's damaged, or if you never got it?

I had that moment with my last vendor order. When I talked about it on the Swagbucks Facebook page, I got sympathy :) and a fair amount of gloom & doom. I was basically told "good luck with that!" and "you're going to have to go through war to get your money back!"

UGH!

I was prepared for a fight *chuckle*

It all started one boring day when I just couldn't take another round of "Telly Hut" without a small piece of my brain exploding. The Cure?  Amazon.com, of course!

I searched Sesame street dvd, filtered the price from low to high, and clicked on ones that looked like they would have good songs, and be over 30 minutes. I found this one :

Though it had the free shipping, I wasn't planning on spending that much. The price was too high. So I thought, hey, take a look at the vendors!. I wasn't taking screenshots of that order, so I got one last night.

I sorta wish this one had been there when I ordered mine on Oct 24. Item price of $3.68 was almost $2 higher than the one I ordered, but it has free shipping. This order is also fulfilled by Amazon. That makes it much easier to get any errors corrected. The vendor has a 97% positive feedback rating, and well over 200k transactions. I would have called it a pretty safe bet!

That would have prompted me to buy the crayons and stuff sooner though, and I wouldn't have gotten the Barney DVD that came with the $4 Amazon video on demand credit. Plus, I wouldn't have had the material for this 3 part series, so, It Was As It Was Meant To Be. 

As it was, I did something I'd not done before. I went for a used DVD. I knew that was adding an extra element of chance into the order but I felt protected by this bubble of good luck I'd had with all my previous orders.

So desperate was I to have something other than "10 fish, 9 fish, 8 fish, seven! I'm in counting backwards heaven!" playing in the background that I went with the cheapest used copy I could find. Don't get me wrong, I *did* check out the seller rating and feedback first.

Ok, not much to work with there, really, Only 49 sales over the lifetime of the vendor, 16 in the last year. I saw that there was some negative feedback in the last year, giving her a 4.6 star rating. So I went to have a look. There were two negative feedbacks over the sellers lifetime. One of them sounded like if the seller had been a little more clear in their description, the problem would have been avoided entirely. The other guy sounded pretty angry.. and as such, pretty incoherent :P So I took his feedback with a grain of salt. Apparently so did the vendor, because she didn't reply to that one at all *chuckle*

I decided to risk it. The item was listed as Fine condition. Fine should be fine enough, I guessed! When the package arrived less than a week later, I thought I'd made a good call! When I opened the package and a bunch of free stickers came sliding out, I was delighted! A free treat for my stepdaughter! It wasn't until I opened the case, turned the disc over, and saw the scratches, fingerprint, smudges, and the floor showing through patches of missing data, that my heart sank.

My first thought?   Oh crap, how am I gonna get my money back?

(I'll add a screenshot of the disc later when I get my webcam back. My cell and digital camera are both not working right now *chuckle*)

My second thought was "Contact the Seller. That's step one!"  So I went to the Swagbucks Toolbar and searched Amazon. Don't remember if I won but that's my search pattern! On the upper right hand of the Amazon site is "Your Account".

Clicking the Your Account link takes you to a page where you can view your orders, change your payment options, change your settings, manage your digital downloads, and personalize your "Amazon experience".

I went to Leave Seller Feedback. There's a link there to contact the seller.

I chose Returns and Refunds Policy the first time I wrote, though I should have chosen Received Damaged, Defective, or Wrong Item. I picked that the second time I wrote :-/  Amazon emails the seller, and when the seller responds, Amazon emails you, to keep privacy on both ends.

I told the seller that the product was Not as described- it was Not in Fine condition. It was as I said above, smudged, scratched, unplayable on either of my DVD players. I appreciated the stickers but what was her return & refund policy?

Eight Days Later, still no word from the seller. That's when I dug a little deeper into Amazon's support for buyers in the Marketplace. Amazon has what they call their "A-Z Guarantee". It stated you could file a clam if :

1. You made payment to the seller through the Amazon.com website or a third party website using Amazon Payments, but the seller failed to deliver the item by 3 calendar days past the maximum estimated delivery date for an order or 30 days from the order date, whichever is sooner; or
2. You received the item, but the item was defective, damaged, or not the item depicted in the seller's description; or
3. You have returned the item to the seller per an agreement between the buyer and seller and the seller has not provided the agreed reimbursement to the buyer after receiving the item.

Before you can file a claim, however, you must try to contact the seller and resolve it with them first. Allow 3 business days for the seller to respond and correct the problem. If the seller doesn't respond, or doesn't address the issue to your satisfaction, then you can file a claim.

I had waited 8 days, 6 business days, for a response. I decided to be a little more patient though. In the case of damaged, defective, or wrong items received, I had to contact the seller within 14 calendar days of receipt. I had done that but had a cushion of time, so I emailed her again through the Contact Seller link.

This time I said that the item was damaged, unplayable, not as described. I had been patient but was still waiting for a reply to my last email 8 days before. Told her I would give it one more shot before filing a claim and leaving negative feedback, and to kindly please rectify the situation.

This time I got a response within two days. My gmail inbox notified me the seller had left a response so I went to Amazon to read it.

From the "Your Account" screen you choose the View Your E-mails with Sellers option.

The seller informed me that she was sorry about the DVD. It played on her players at home but not all machines are the same, and she would not have meant to sell something that didn't work. (Seriously though, did she LOOK at it before putting it in the box? It was STICKY!) She refunded the price of the item, and 50 cents of the shipping cost, citing her out of pocket costs as reason not to refund the full shipping.

My rationale on that is - what about My out of pocket costs? Ok, so I didn't TECHNICALLY have any since it was Amazon gift cards bought through Swagbucks, but still! That's $2.48 I'm out for a disc I have to throw away!

Oh well, live and learn at this point. I decided not to chase down the rest of the shipping. From her comments I can tell she's a mom selling whatever her family doesn't use anymore. I'm going to let it go.. but I won't give the feedback I would have given had she done a full shipping refund.

I toodled on over to the Your Account screen again, clicked Leave Seller Feedback again. This time I hovered my mouse over the three star mark ..

 

And Click to open the feedback form. It asks you a few questions, then gives you a chance to leave 400 characters worth of comments.

Once you hit submit, you get a chance to review your feedback before it's published.

Once you press the "I'm done leaving feedback", it's (mostly) set in stone. You can not leave feedback twice on the same order. Apparently there's a way to remove feedback but I didn't look into it last night. Another time.

I would have given her a 4 out of 5 if she had refunded half the shipping price. Only 4 because having to wait 10 days and write twice is not great for a buyer. Doesn't encourage repeat business. I gave her the 3 stars because only offering 50 cents seemed.. Bogus. IF she had listed in the item description that the disc had scratches, neither of us would have been out any shipping because I wouldn't have ordered it. So, 3 stars, sorry ellenreadsbooks.

Look! I'm on TV again!

Now her seller rating has dropped to 4.5 stars. Her rating for this month down to 50% because I was one of two orders that month. That stinks.. but that's the risk of sending out dirty, scratched, damaged products.

I got lucky, all in all. I didn't actually have to use the Amazon A - Z Guarantee. But what if she had never responded? Or told me the item was not like that when she sent it, and she would not send a refund?

Back to the Your Account screen. This time we'd click the Your orders button.

Scroll down to the order in question. As you can see, here is another way to contact the seller. This time though, you would press File a Claim.

Once you click that, an Order Summary will open. This shows all the emails you have sent the vendor. In this case, it also tells me that I have received a refund from the vendor in the amount of $2.23.

If the seller hadn't issued a refund, I would have scrolled down to the File a Claim button. It says my deadline for filing a reimbursement claim would be Januray 23, 2011. My birthday! LOL! So, 90 days from purchase date basically. 

Since I didn't have to actually file a claim, I can't say how long it takes to receive your refund. I do know that Amazon has all the evidence they need- they tell you before you send your seller any email that they keep records / emails in case of claims being filed. I would hope it was quickly. Given the negative response on the Swagbucks Facebook wall, I guess there's a chance it could take a while. However, coming out of this experience, I am optimistic that if I ever need to use their A - Z system, I would get my money back.

And so ends our 3 part series on what a swagdork I am when it comes to shopping :P 

One last thing before I go! Yesterday I got a referral. A new swaggernaut joined the family! But I am not sure, by looking at the swag user name, who it is. This reminds me to remind you to remember to check your Swagbucks "My Friends" list and your Swagbucks email! (did your eyeballs spin?)  You can't send swagmail unless someone is on your friends list, and they can't send to you! Your friends list can be found by putting your mouse over your swagtotal, anywhere on the swagbucks site. You will see a red number next to an envelope next to your swagtotal if you have any mail waiting to be read.

GraciousMe, aka Grace C. My new swagfriend! If you are reading this, Please go check "My Friends" and accept my request :) Also you can send me a PM on Facebook if you have any questions about raking up the swag!

Last but not least..


If anyone reading this is not yet a member of Swagbucks, but wants to get on the swagtrain and start earning the free loot, there's no time like the present! Just go to the swidget , up top on the right there, press the Sign Up button on the bottom right. Fill out a short form, confirm your email, and get 30 swagbucks to get you rolling! Then come back here and start with October's second blog post, "Beginner Tips for Swagsurfing!", for tips on how to get started. PM me, Friend JennySweets on Swagbucks! :D


With that, and with the post later than expected again (You know, Kids.. you just have to play with them when they look at you that certain way..!), I bid you adieu!

I hope you enjoyed the three part series. I have No idea what I will be blogging about tomorrow, so check back and see what I can pull out of my hat. I doubt it will have anything to do with flying squirrels.

Until then, HAPPY SWAGSURFING!