The Fox Report
Barry Fox’s technology column
Online purchase pitfalls and parrot loops
Online trading – for sellers and buyers
– is now for most of us a routine way
of life. Covid, of course, accelerated
the movement away from the High
Street and on to the Internet. On a
macro scale, it does work amazingly
well. From daily groceries to highpriced white goods and computers it
is a great way to compare prices and
make purchases. But, as this piece
shows, when things go wrong the virtual High Street can be a very lonely
place, with industrial levels of buck
passing, evasion and obfuscation.
Failed to arrive
I buy large and small electronics
direct from dealers and via Amazon
and eBay (at fixed price, not by auction). Delivery is variously by mail
and courier. My recent experience
with an eBay purchase, shipped via
Royal Mail, has left me cautious of
ever again relying on the eBay/Royal
Mail combination.
Few customers will have the time
(and be foolish enough) to spend as
much effort as I am on investigating
the loss of a £50 package. So, a synopsis may be worth sharing.
My purchased goods failed to arrive, so I queried with eBay. The
seller claimed despatch and provided
eBay with Tracking Data provided
by Royal Mail, which purported to
show that the package was delivered
and signed for.
But Royal Mail’s ‘Proof of Delivery’
relied on clearly phoney data. The
data does not give the address for
delivery given by the seller; does not
give the address of actual delivery;
does not provide photographic evidence of delivery and, most significantly, contradictorily claims that
the item was signed for by ‘Jerry’ but
reproduces a signature scribble which
looks like ‘snc’. There is no one at my
address (or among my neighbours)
who signed for anything, and no one
has any name or signature remotely
resembling Jerry or ‘snc’.
10
that the item has not been delivered
to your address’ – which the Royal
Mail parrots refuse to provide!
Breaking the loop
Pass the parcel
Over the course of well over a dozen
emails, I have repeatedly explained
this to eBay and eBay has repeatedly
instructed me to contact Royal Mail,
asking Royal Mail to admit non-delivery. Royal Mail repeatedly refuses to
admit non-delivery or acknowledge
or investigate the phoniness of its
Tracking Data. eBay still steadfastly
refuses a refund unless Royal Mail
admits failure to deliver.
It’s a parrot loop impasse, made
doubly difficult, frustrating, timeconsuming and Kafkaesque because
eBay’s emails are sent from a no-reply
address and refer to a Help page
(https://www.ebay.co.uk/help/home)
which is of little help and takes the
frustrated user round in circles.
The only way to reply to eBay is by
filing a fresh complaint referencing
the previous complaint. But the new
message has a rigid 1000 character
limit and uploaded evidence must
be as a pdf or image file (gif, .jpg,
.jpeg, .pdf, and .png). Each filing is
dealt with by a different employee.
The latest different eBay employee
confirms ‘I acknowledge your assertion that the Royal Mail Tracking
document does not provide sufficient
evidence of delivery, especially considering the discrepancies in signatures and the lack of address records
or photographic evidence.’ But eBay
then just parrots its insistence on
‘confirmation from Royal Mail, stating
As an experiment, I have now started
exploring other ways to break out
of the eBay/Royal Mail parrot loop.
Perhaps, fortunately my eBay account
is tied to my credit card, so I have
now sought help from the credit card
company in obtaining a refund from
eBay, on the grounds that eBay was
in error to rely on obviously phoney
Royal Mail Tracking data.
I have also filed a crime report with
the police, detailing Royal Mail’s
failure to recognise or investigate
self-evident fraud in its Tracking Data.
I will share the outcomes, good
or bad; and also from other remedy
avenues yet to be explored. Watch
this space!
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Practical Electronics | August | 2023
