Morality and Other People's Mistakes
Posted by Colin Rule on October 05, 2006 at 04:08 PM in General , Musings from Colin Rule | Permalink
My friend Adam Bowman brought a recent thread in the Seller Central board to my attention regarding buyer obligations to sellers. I thought it was worth sharing here, because it’s a difficult dispute situation that raises some interesting questions.
In summary, an eBay buyer purchased a Halloween costume for her daughter and was sent the wrong size. The seller admitted to the mistake a
nd explained that mailing labels had been accidentally switched at the time of shipping, so the buyer had gotten a different costume by mistake (another buyer also got the wrong size.) The seller told the buyer to wait for further instructions about where to ship the item to so that the problem could be solved.
However, the buyer was happy with the costume, and had already used it. She didn’t want to return the item, and she was especially worried that if she shipped off the costume she had, the replacement wouldn’t make it back to her in time for Halloween (which was the reason why she bought the costume in the first place.)
The situation led to a great deal of discussion in Seller Central.
The members posting in the thread considered a variety of possible solutions. A few members posted that the buyer had no obligation to return the item if she was happy with it. Others suggested schemes to quickly get the right costumes to the right buyers. Some members suggested, however, that the buyer had a “moral obligation” to send the item back. The buyer’s ethics were called into question, suggesting that she was being selfish by keeping the item and refusing to ship it away.
The long and the short of it was that many of the members concluded that there was no clear eBay etiquette for a situation like this one. While most did agree that the member who makes the mistake has the obligation to make it right, in this case it’s unclear that the buyer (who did nothing wrong) has a similar obligation to give up the item they received and risk not having the costume for Halloween.
While there’s no easy answer, I’d suggest that this is a great opportunity for some creative problem solving. Instead of focusing on just the two costumes, could the seller find a duplicate of the one received by the buyer in question to send to the other buyer? Depending on the cost of the costumes, shipping a single replacement might cost less than shipping both costumes between the buyers in a switch. Are we sure the other buyer is dissatisfied with the costume they received? Maybe there’s a way to expand the size of the smaller costume so that it won’t be an issue.
I don’t think calling the morality of the buyer into question is the best approach. The buyer did nothing wrong – it was an honest mistake, but it was the seller’s fault. If she is worried about the item not arriving by Halloween (or perhaps by some date before Halloween, like a carnival) she should feel free to say that she doesn’t want to participate in the costume swap plan. She should be able to veto it.
What do you think? What is the obligation of the buyer in this scenario? What could eBay do to help buyers and sellers resolve situations like this, if anything? I (and Adam) would love to hear your thoughts in the Chatter discussion forum.
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