Oh, this is so not okay. I was perusing the new Buy It Now listings this afternoon, and saw a lot of $100 FV silver quarters for $1300. I dithered over the "too good to be true" aspect for a minute or two, then decided to go ahead and put my faith in Buyer Protection. As I expected, I got to the end of the PayPal payment dialog, hit "Confirm Payment", and got a message that the transaction could not be completed. Someone else beat me to it. A moment later, though, I got an email from PayPal confirming my payment. "Okay", I thought, "implementing distributed transactions across large, busy networks is tricky. It might take them a minute or two to finish unwinding the transaction." (I work in a related field, so I understand the technical issues involved.) A few minutes later, I got email from eBay "thanking me for my order", with a link to view the transaction details. When I clicked that link, I saw this: To shorten an already long story, I spent half an hour calling PayPal, then getting transferred to eBay, who told me that I'd have to deal with it through PayPal, who then told me that I should ASK the seller to refund my payment. I asked politely what I should do if the seller didn't cooperate -- a distinct possibility, given the sketchy scent of the original offer. The rep said I could file a PayPal dispute -- but I've never had to do that before, and I'm worried that they'll demand documentation I can't provide (since I'm not even listed as the auction winner). I'm not really worried that I'm going to lose my money, but I'm unnerved. This is clearly a technical failure on eBay's side; they accepted an inconsistent series of operations, and they've failed to do the reversal that would restore consistency. But it looks like there isn't even a way for me to point this out to them. I'll keep trying, though. eBay is a grown-up e-commerce site, and they CANNOT be making this kind of mistake.
Wait to hear from the seller first. Did you use a CC for the transaction? If you did call the credit card company. You have proof with the confirming email from paypal - it should have the auction information in it.
The seller promptly refunded my money, thank goodness. This doesn't absolve eBay, though. Sometimes you see a computer error, and (if you've been through the ranks yourself) you think "that's a sophomore-level mistake" -- anybody who's had more than two years of comp sci should know better. This isn't one. This is a "nobody should even THINK of building something like this without several higher-level classes under their belt" mistake. It's a well-known and well-understood problem -- we know how to prevent the mistake, it's just a lot of work, and it requires people who know what they're doing. Deploying code on a system the size of eBay that's vulnerable to "race conditions" like this? That's a "fire the whole department and start over"-level offense. I was lucky that the seller turned out to be honest. ("Lucky" in a limited sense -- this also implies that somebody's getting $100 face of silver quarters for $1300, and it isn't me. )
The second "screensnip" was my way of making the point that screenshots are trivially easy to fake. In this case, it's extra-easy, because the eBay landing page contains no information about what transaction I was trying to view.
The ebay/paypal connection is pretty poor. Here's what happened to me... I sold something a few weeks ago for like $8 on ebay. I got an e-mail from the winner saying that he somehow paid twice and could I please refund one of the transactions, paypal and ebay weren't cooperating. When I logged on to paypal, sure enough, there were two transactions from him at the same minute and twice as much money as there should be. I refunded one of the transactions, which in turn marked the payment as unsent on ebay and prompted ebay sending the guy a message about paying. When I marked the item as sent, I got a message from ebay, telling me that I shouldn't send items before receiving payment. It ended up being a totally ridiculous. Moral of the/my story, the two don't even pretend to work together. I'm surprised it's not exploited more.
Assuming your deal was for 90% silver quarters - Did you really think someone was going to sell you $100 face of silver quarters at $1300 when they currently melt at $2826?
Can only speak for myself, but on occassion stuff is listed for far less than it is worth by less than savvy sellers and if you're the first to see it a good deal can had. (or not) I once bought a 1926 Austria 25 Schilling gold coin on eBay for $65 when it melted for $90. You can tell by the prices involved it was a long time ago. The real treat when was it came back from NGC as MS65. At the other end of the spectrum, I did once do a Buy-It-Now on an 1883 Argentino for $170 when it melted for $365. I checked the catalog and saw that it was listed in the 4th edition Krause book as $170 in UNC and concluded the seller had checked a catalog without any consideration about gold content. Coin never arrived. Did get a refund from PayPal though.
Yep. A deal like that is probably a one-in-ten-thousand find -- but there are tens of thousands of new listings in this category every day. I haven't gotten $2800 worth of silver for $1300, but I've gotten $270 worth of silver for $130 from a high-volume, seasoned coin dealer on eBay, and I've gotten comparable deals from a wide range of sellers. The problem is, for deals like this, you get a lot of people trying to pounce at the same time. I rarely win, because my reflexes and my thought processes aren't the fastest. And sometimes, things like this happen.
Back to the topic at hand... jeffB's right. I've made my living (like him, it sounds like) in the field for several decades, and not protecting transactional consistency borders on criminal negligence. Perhaps a "real world example" to clarify the severity of this issue. You log on to your bank's website, and transfer $500 from savings to checking. This is a "transaction" that must occur completely, or not at all. Why? Simple. Your transfer is MULTIPLE modifications of information. It is, in its simplest form, the WITHDRAWAL of $500 from your savings account, AND the DEPOSIT of $500 to your checking account. At a bare minimum, TWO events must occur for the transaction to be complete. Of critical importance is that if one fails, then the other CAN NOT be allowed to continue. If we fail to withdraw $500 from your savings account (for whatever reason) we can not then proceed to complete the deposit into checking. If we do, we have created money that does not exist, and improperly credited it to an account that does not contain it. Likewise, if the deposit into checking fails, the withdrawal from savings MUST be undone, otherwise we have simply "negated" the existance of $500 of our customer's money. Community Chest cards not withstanding, "Bank errors"...in your favor or not...simply can't be allowed to happen like this. It's an issue of integrity. If the system allows money to appear or disappear at random, then there is no faith or credibility in ANYTHING the system tells us at any time. In short, the system is now worthless, regardless of what features it offers. What the OP has told all of us, then, is that EBay (and by extension, PayPal, EBay's property) has, in at least one situation, failed to protect and enforce transactional consistency. It allowed an item to be sold that was not available, and then, failing to properly determine the item was unavailable, PROCEEDED WITH THE SALE. Worse yet, when it later became CLEAR the item had not been available, it allowed an orphaned record of a sale to exist, and did NOT roll back the invalid parts of the transaction. The integrity of the entire EBay/Paypal system is now in question. EBay's unwilingness to acknowledge/address this fact calls the COMPANY'S integrity into question as well.
