19 March 2025
With the lack of ANY decent on-line market place, we have to put up with the crap that those that do pretent to provide that service today. In addition to eBay and Amazon, the likes of The Range, B&Q and other on-line stores provide ways for other sellers to pretend to be bigger than they are and can hide behind their hosts customer service support. A site like abebooks do a lot better job at providing communications direct between buyers and sellers and respect legal obligations, while recent fun with The Range's market place highlight the lack of that facility on other sites. What makes these sites more difficult to use is the problem of establishing just what IS stocked in a local store when 'on-line only' products clutter the results.
I've been trying to sort a replacement for the smart watch that I purchased last year but never had any success with. The seller gave me a full refund which was nice since they did not want the watch returned, but the main reason for that was so they could remove the honest feedback that the watch was only worth the £30 I'd paid, and prehaps not the £100 list price. Am I able to pay two or three hundred pounds for a watch? No and I don't see the value in that, so I was looking at reconditioned older models and targeted the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 at the £60 mark as a good compromise. One arrived a short time after ordering it, and the fun with setting it up is tracked on the health blog. As I'm a long term Linux/Android user, I've also given in and gone for a Tab A9+ tablet despite the also iritating crap of Google which is almost impossible to remove, but that is another thread. The watch strap failed within the first hour, not helped by the style where the tail of the strap is fed back inside. Not having any spare 'fat' around my wrist, this is difficult to feed in. The supplier has issued a £10 refund as they could not provide a replacement and I had already been looking for a better alternative. Irritatingly the older watch has a 21mm strap while the new one is 20mm, so I can't just use that for a while. Now the UTTER CRAP that is the eBay search process. WHY can't a 'default' to UK only suppliers and sort by price of the MAIN item being sold? I've cancelled the first order as I'd not picked up that eBay had selected a Chinese stock item with a long delivery time. At least THAT was being honestly reported, while other 'UK Stock' items arrive after several days with the 48 Hour Royal Mail label stuck on top of the Chinese one. Just because a seller lists 'Doncaster' as their location does not mean they actually even live in the UK and THAT is just dishonest trading. At least eBay does respect UK legal rules and correct things like not issuing a full refund for goods returned within the 14 day window. The strap that is due by Monday from 'poundland' is yet another Chinese seller pretending to be a UK one!
What really irritates today is that I was happy to go to one of the four accessory shops here in Evesham to buy a strap at a higher price, but despite many thousands of phone and tablet covers and unrelated things like vaps, none of them had any Samsung straps and only a small number of incompatible apple straps. So we are forced into having to go on-line and trawl pages of essentially identical listings ALL using the same picture, but with different lowest prices created by adding totally unrelated 'extras' to the listing. It's not until you go in and select the actual product you are looking for that you get to 'out of stock', something that I hit time after time trying to find a cover for the tablet, and selecting alternatives which again are Chinese stock with he identical out of stock reports. Even worse, switching to Amazon gets the SAME product listings much of the time with the same prices and out of stock. All just a complete waste of time. We need something a lot better like HONEST trading and clean product listings?