Saturday, July 23, 2011

Boocoo of Blues

I haven't been satisfied with eBay for a long while--too many charlatans and scam artists, too much merchandise that doesn't live up to its description, too many fly-by-night sellers. But everything that's wrong with eBay is amplified exponentially on Boocoo, an auction site that I've dealt with once and will never buy from again.

Whereas you always have nagging doubts about some eBay sellers, it appears that the honest legitimate vendor is the exception on Boocoo. I bought a single item--a USB flash drive--and even on something that mundane, what I got was a bootleg flash drive that didn't actually offer the storage space that was indicated. I sent it back to the vendor, who promised a refund, but nothing ever came of it. I contacted Boocoo, who ignored me. And I wasn't even able to post feedback regarding this, because Boocoo had (until today) a rule that you couldn't post feedback after fourteen days. However, it took me longer than that to discover the crooked nature of this seller.

The fact that Boocoo not only failed to deal with my problem, but let this seller continue to post more dishonest auctions for a while, implies that they prefer to look the other way as far as unscrupulous sellers are concerned. Of course, the seller is no longer active on Boocoo, so now that I can post negative feedback, it's irrelevant. He may be operating on the site under another name, but I have no way of knowing that.

I find myself buying more and more from Amazon retailers and less and less from auction sites; Amazon seems to have a higher standard of conduct for their retailers, and they are very helpful when a problem does arise. If you do have a desire to take part in online auction sites, though, remember that Boocoo is the poorly-lit back alley of the internet...

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