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weird situation, no partial refund? learn from my mistake

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DiTBho:
Imagine you have four friends and want to share a project with them. You have only one board, so you publish a post in the bazaar area of the web looking for other four unique piece of hardware and someone replies and proposes a private deal which consists of a super discount for the hardware in return of your support for Linux and u-boot.

It sounds exciting, and tasty, ain't it?

So the deal is
- you pay the shipping cost
- you pay 10 euro for each board
- you agree you will send source of the Linux and u-boot as soon as it's stable enough
- you get four boards

You agree with this, the seller agrees with this, and some weeks later you receive the package.

Yet at first impression it seems that something is wrong, like if, before delivery, the package was stuck in some creepy warehouse.

What's wrong, what's wrong? Weird feelings, perhaps I am just the kind who tends to see everything black on the mirror, but then you unbox and what you see clearly shows the packaging with soft card-boards is so brittle that most of new boards really arrived shattered like an egg.

2 boards are seriously damaged, and you see broken DIMM connectors with several pins bent, the plastic is crushed, there are several scratches on the PCB, and even the RJ45 looks no good.

One board looks OK, the other has a crushed  RJ45 connector, but it somehow boots and the led blinks, so there is hope.



But, what now? You call the seller, you tell more than 50% of the items arrived damaged, you paid 30 euro for the packaging, you point out you need the hardware, so your proposal is a partial refund or something like paying the postage for a couple of boards as replacement for the damaged ones.

But the seller replies that he is willing to refund the entire amount, but not a partial refund.

You explain again that you desperately need that hardware, so one card arrived in working condition, the other looks repairable, two cards are dead, but - two somehow working cards - are better than nothing, so a partial refund sounds like the perfect solution.


And at this point, the seller replies that it's not his fault if items were damaged during shipping, and he made a big favor about the discount.

So, you point out that you paid 30 euro for the shipping, and soft-card-board cost only 8 euro, not 30, so the seller has some responsibility for the items arrived damaged. And regarding the "big favor", yes, the discount facilitates development, but the deal was about releasing the software support for free and this facilitates the seller to better sell his boards that otherwise fewer person are willing to buy because unsupported by modern u-boot and Linux versions.

And to these point, the seller replies "I don't like your tone", and with no more replies, he simply hangs up, and the discussion is really over. He must feel offended, or something.

How to counter "I don't like your tone" in a conversation? And what would you do now? Filling a Paypal claim won't help because for Paypal you have to return all the items in order to have a refund.

Weird feelings and disappoint, I think I will give up  :-//

PlainName:
The simple solution would be to return the lot for a full refund. The chap may not want to do a partial refund because he may think you're trying it on to get half the stuff for free (which wouldn't be the case here, but perhaps he just has a lot of Ebay experience).

The problem, as I think you are putting it, is that your need for the hardware overrides pretty much everything. So that boils down to whether one of the is sufficient for you, of if you need them all. If the latter then you're clearly not going to achieve that and you might as well send the lot back.

Perhaps you could do whatever you want to do and then ship him the uboot stuff as source with a couple of files corrupted. Oops. Must've got damaged in the shipping, but it's not your problem that you sent it sans error correction over a V.23 modem.

Bassman59:
Did you pay with a credit card?

If so, start a chargeback.

station240:
My only though is the seller doesn't want to deal with the situation where the one undamaged board has a hairline crack and fails later on.

Some sellers take advice on how to improve their packaging when it fails, others go out of business eventually  :-DD

DiTBho:

--- Quote from: Bassman59 on May 21, 2021, 03:14:05 am ---Did you pay with a credit card?

--- End quote ---

I paid with Paypal, but physically Paypal requested a SEPA Direct Debit to my bank.

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