So tragic it's funny

Some time ago I mentioned my first ebay burning. Well the story has progressed somewhat.

So this is what happened.

Feburary. I was collecting lego bricks for mosaics at the time. I saw some lego that I was interested in, but the seller mentioned that she would only ship to the United States. But she accepted paypal, so I emailed her and asked if she'd ship to Australia. She at first said no, but followed this up a short time later (about 20 min in fact) with another email to say that she would.

So the end of the auction time comes, and the lego I'm interested in has had no other bids. Now, the starting price for all of the lego brick sets was $0.01. That's right, 1 cent each. She had 21 lots, of 1 cent each. So I bid on all of them, and won them all (actually there were one or two other lots that I didn't bid on because I wasn't interested in them).

Now this is where it all came unglued. She told me that they did not combined postage, and postage for each item was going to be $3.15 each, or $66.15.

I went back and checked her writeup for the items. To quote:

"Please remember that shipping is not necessarily combined for all auctions."

Now I would take that to mean that for items where it is impractical to combine postage (say for bulkier items) postage would not be combined. She did not say in her description "We do not combine postage". In fact, for small bags of lego, it would be impractical *not* to combine postage, as separate wrapping/envelopes would be needed for each lot, and it would be far less fiddly to put the whole lot together.

Well, I certainly was not going to pay $66.15. After several emails back and forth, the final postage price was quoted at $37. OK, this is still a complete ripoff, as airmail for that quantity of lego would have been about $10-$15 (I actually went back to several earlier auctions, counted bricks, and gave the postage details for those auctions to her), but I bit the bullet and paid her.

Then a day or two later (and here's the clincher), I get an email saying that to send all the lego by airmail was going to cost her $55.00 - $60.80, which she didn't have on her at the time, so she sent it all surface mail.

Skip to today. One package arrives, postmarked with $6 postage. One single solitary package that cost $6 to send surface mail.

So. I was quoted $37 for postage. It cost her $6. This is $31 that she pocketed for herself. She said she refused to combine postage. The package arrived combined. I was lied to. I paid $37 for surface mail, when it would have cost $10-$15 airmail.

I just had to laugh. What else can you do, really? However, I did address my concerns in an email, and asked her to provide 21 good reasons why I shouldn't leave her a page full of negative feedback for ripping me off and lying to me.

We'll see what she says :)