yamatoku ebay have just lost me

[zmaster18]

Got his new message... he said even less this time. Looks like he really won't budge and I'm not getting a refund.

[L___E___T]

 



Just take it to PayPal and open a dispute.  The shipping costs are nuts based on the weight so I would be surprised if you didn't win, it seems pretty transparent.


This means you probably won't be able to buy from them again, I would suspect.


Would be great if you could keep us updated for the sake of other members.

[zmaster18]

I don't want to make him mad, I've read posts on other sites saying that people who leave negative feedback get banned. Whenever I do have to complain, I make an effort to be polite as possible and choose my words carefully.

I will inform you guys everytime I have a problem... so probably in 2 weeks from now

[chowder]

I don't think getting banned should be a major concern, would you seriously consider buying from them again?  Paypal/eBay usually side with the buyer unless there's concrete proof in the seller's favour.  I've won a couple of disputes (against other sellers) just because they were so slow or ignored the messages to the point where I just got refunded automatically.

Escalate it, they'll have to prove shipping costs, and a $200 "handling fee" isn't going to be justifiable.

[kevkevkev]

WHY DID YOU PAY?
didnt it seem high? Yeah they should refund but i doubt they will.
If any shipping is quoted before you pay, if it seems high dont pay. I bought about 5 games  during which they changed the shipping process so i was invoiced alot more. I simply didnt pay until it was right.

[zmaster18]

I've done that before where I've argued for days and days until he lowered his price. This time I was waiting almost a whole month for an invoice and I just wanted to get my stuff fast. I'm still very satisfied with my purchase and it was worth the price I paid... even if I got ripped off.

For my next invoice I'm going to make sure that I'm not overcharged too bad...   

[daskrabs]

I got shill bid from yamatoku last night on an FC game. Blatantly obvious. I reported it. Hopefully something good comes of it. If you get shilled, report it.

[chowder]

There was a site somewhere listing all of the shill bids on his auction, I believe there were hundreds of accounts set up where 90-something% of their bids were (non-winning ones) on Yamatoku's auctions.  Either he's the only one they try to buy from, or something dodgy's going on.

[arnpoly]

I also had shill bidding on an auction I won the other day and I reported it as well.

I will say that I have not had to deal with any outrageous shipping charges but that's probably because I'm only buying loose carts.

[L___E___T]

How can you be sure there's shill bidding occurring?

[chowder]

I guess it's very hard to prove, but he had a lot of low-feedback people who only ever seemed to bid on his items, but never won them, or retracted their bids.  Not 100% proof, obviously, but very suspicious when it happens frequently.  There was a site called Auction Scams or something that listed bidding stats of eBayers, but it seems to be gone now.

[UglyJoe]

There's still evidence of it on some forums: http://www.retrocollect.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=9642

Curiously, though, the site that outed them is no longer around.  If you go to their Twitter page, it only has a single post and it's linking to their article outing yamatoku.  Seems a bit personal...

[L___E___T]

 



We'll, I mainly stopped buying from them because their auctions always (as a rule) end high - which just meant it wasn't a good source for bargains.  One may as well browse BIN listings.

So I did have suspicions of shill bidding - that website is pretty damning with some of the retraction amounts, which I find amazing (100s of retractions in one month?!?).

So that, plus shipping costs doubling, plus the time to respond to mails has totally put me off and I don't even browse anymore.  Shame.

[L___E___T]

 



Yamatoku generally have a really good service I think, but they are known shill bidders.  So you rarely see great deals, auctions almost always end high.