I agree also. Whilst new in comparison to this theme and to the board, I have dealt in mail order transactions for 8 years now and completed some £5m (yes $8m) of turnover in that time.

I have had two similar occurrences on ebay. First i may point out that whereas multiple positives from one ebayer do not add to your score, multiple negatives do. In my early days, being unfearful of reponse, i posted 3 negatives to one person who refused to pay. Within 1 hour other ebayers had seen this and felt brave enough to enter negatives too. That person was automatically suspended from ebay.

The other example involved a trading colleague, and this makes the original problem here look tame. A customer of Sotheby's auctioneers (who you may recall many years ago were one of the ebay pioneers) bought some 600 postcards from them, at prices from £3 upwards, with a total of about £3,000. Sotheby's accordingly invoiced the person for 600 handling charges at £6 a piece and 600 postage charges at £3.85 each. The total bill was near £9,000. Even when the customer said he would fly in from Andorra to London to collect the lots he was told the handling charges would still apply. He paid up 'temporarily' and received the goods still packed in the same series of binders that the vendor had supplied them in. There was no 'handling' involved at all. Subsequently, following legal advice and speaking to ebay, he sued Sotheby's and won.

Ebay issued a statement which is still part of their terms and conditions to state that 'handling charges' were just that and that it was reasonable for this to include the cost of packing materials used etc. only. They then stated that the individual shipping quoted per item must not be unreasonably more than the actual cost.

The example cited earlier in the thread of $100 for a chip and $50 for shipping is totally against ebays rules and regulations.

HOWEVER, having said all that (and no doubt you are bored if you got this far down the message) Ebay themselves will not interfere with any transaction where the bidder 'has agreed to be bound by both their terms and conditions and any stated by the seller'

In the case we are talking about. Had this been in the UK, the persons name would be public knowledge by now, and would appear in time in relevant journals etc. also.