USPS Priority Mail is quoted as 6-10 business days, today is day 11 and I get this PayPal claim filed against me without customer contacting me first.
All of a sudden I am getting a landslide of scammers and just plain a-holes. The worst offenders are in Italy and Spain, but France is making a push lately.. Sigh.. Looks like I am going to start declining international sales this late in the game.
It is certainly time to quit!!! :furious:
I think the buyer should have contacted you directly first. That would have definately been best, for a number of reasons.
But not everyone buys on the internet often and ebay is known for many scams and he might have been using the Paypal claim feature in an effort to best protect his buyer protection rights (in his view). And as I understand that feature, at this stage it does not show negatively in any profile of yours, so so far no harm done. You also say its day 11 (as of yesterday). But the message you quote says you gave the buyer a tracking number on 9/20. This is why he is seeing it as (and saying) it appears in 15 days USPS did not get the package yet (from 9/20 to Oct 5th).
Now what I am guessing about what happened is that you provided the tracking # on the 20th, got it to USPS a few days later (which is reasonable of course) and now 11 days after they have it the buyer is freaking out (since you say it was indeed "day 11"). One question is, did you let him know in addition to the tracking #, the actual hand-off date to USPS to know when to start counting days? And did you let the buyer know that the USPS website for this is CRAP, total CRAP when it comes to timely status updates? I'm willing to bet that the damn site said the same thing for Ideal's packages for much longer than reasonable, and he quite possibly never knew that they eventually confirmed that indeed you did not rip him off until someone, looking at USPS.com months and months later, sees it says it left Miami and wondering WTF he was ever talking about. (Seeing that now for himself he owes you an apology).
I once had an international package where USPS.com only updated it accurately about a week after I received the item late. If I ever had to use them for international shipment I'd be repeating in CAPS over and over not to trust that site as up to date. They are great for domestic tracking, thats it.
Bottom line is you can't assume all customers are smart. And people do get scared if a trusted name like the USPS is not saying the same thing as some internet seller they never met. To a buyer what they see that scares them is "This does not indicate receipt by the USPS or the actual mailing date.". To minimize your own frustration I'd suggest its best to clearly communicate upfront (if you want to minimize this kind of experience) that the USPS may inaccurately say that for a while and that "Delivery status information will be provided if / when available" is no joke, it may come slow from them, if at all.
