It didn’t ever show up on our Informed Delivery for that day, or any day, and we watched the mailman drive right on past our house. The next day, Bobby talked to the mailman, and he said he didn’t have any packages for us, and he checked to see if it might have been taken back to the post office. He said they didn’t have a record of it, either, but the ebay tracking showed it arriving in Huntsville and being delivered on that day. Last year a similar thing happened, but it was from Amazon. I ordered a slow cooker for my son and DIL, and followed the tracking all the way to their city. The tracking said that the item was delivered, but they got their mail and it was not there, and the local post office had no record of that tracking number or anything being sent to that address. My son checked with their neighbors, and at his work (since it is a small town, and he knows the mailman), and it just was not delivered anywhere that they could find. Thankfully, since it was Amazon, they gave me a refund, and I ordered her a different one; but I think that the scam sellers must have a way of using fake usps tracking numbers somehow.
Just as an FYI...I've had packages show up on the online tracking system as being out for delivery (and they've been delivered), and they've not shown up on my Informed Delivery Digest, even though other packages have. This has happened a few times recently. My Amazon orders these days are almost always shipped via Amazon Drivers, but I recently placed 2 Rock Auto orders, both of which split-shipped via USPS from different locations. On both orders, one package showed up on Informed Delivery Digest, and the other did not. I wonder if those sellers are committing Federal Mail Fraud by providing false USPS tracking numbers. I also wonder what form of Proof of Delivery they would provide.
That is what I am hoping that ebay will investigate, @John Brunner . It might still be an mis-delivery to the wrong address/wrong street; but the tracking should NOT have come from California, in any case. I am not expecting anything to really happen, but hoping that maybe it will at least be investigated.
I think between EBay, Amazon and Walmart, that EBay is most likely to police their sellers. One reason I decided to not sell stuff on EBay as a hobby is that in many cases, buyers are ripping off sellers and EBay seems to always side with the buyer, even to an unreasonable degree. So I think they'll go after a genuinely dishonest seller.
I wonder about the Sure Post / Smart Post tracking. I know that when UPS drops a package at the post office they mark it "delivered" even though it has not arrived at the final destination.
When I look up the UPS/USPS hand-off on the UPS website, UPS provides the USPS Tracking ID. At least, that's how I recall it. I don't know if Sure Post refers to all UPS-->USPS deliveries or just a specific type. With Amazon opening up 2 warehouses near me, the only stuff that's not delivered by their drivers are supplements that ship directly from their 3rd party sellers.
I absolutely LOVE those solar lights. Now that it is winter, I brought them in to my south bay window and, if it is sunny, they still sparkle for an hour or two come night time.
In my Amazon Reviews, I generally give honest reviews, as best I can. I have gotten a bit discouraged with Amazon reviews because, too often, Amazon will refuse to post reviews that I write that are not complimentary. While I can understand that they want to sell something, and bad reviews probably don't help to sell an item, they do encourage shoppers to believe that they can trust the reviews they read. Most of my reviews are accepted, but I have noticed that Amazon never refuses a good review, while they are far more apt to refuse a bad one. After spending time writing a review, and even adding photos, after a few of them were rejected in the same month, I have greatly reduced the amount of time that I am willing to devote to leaving a review, and I have far less trust in Amazon reviews.
That's concerning. My compliance with writing reviews for all of my purchases ebbs & flows. I'm not sure I've ever written a very negative one on Amazon (but I've had negative reviews rejected on the FoodSaver vacuum sealer site.) A quick look on the web says that using pics & videos are more likely to get your review rejected, but no one knows why (and it is a subjective opinion.) This is wide-spread enough that I've found lots of discussions about it, with conflicting opinions as to why, but everyone agrees that it's a common occurrence. I read of Amazon Vine participants getting their product reviews rejected with no explanation, then they get threatened with being kicked out of the program if they don't submit their reviews on time. There was a survey of 50 U.S. Amazon reviewers just this past October. Twelve out of 88 reviews (14%) were not posted, and nearly all of them were 2 or 3 star reviews. Some thought that off-shore staff who process the reviews may be applying their cultural standards to phrases or subject matter. The problem is that there is no one at Amazon to talk to about this...everyone's guessing as to what the reasons are. That sucks.
The only time I've written them about a review that they deleted, I received a reply that didn't make a lot of sense to me. I don't remember the wording now, but the idea of it was that I should try reviewing the experience rather than the product. Who the heck places an order from Amazon for the experience of it? My experience, more often than not, is that they don't even other shipping it for a week or two, and I have a feeling that that review wouldn't be published either. I hate reviews that ramble on about how long it took for the product to arrive, where the delivery service placed the package, and so on. I read reviews to see what people think about the product, and I think that's true of most people. Now, I'll write a review every now and then, but I rarely include photos anymore, and I don't want to spend a whole lot of time on a review that might not be published anyhow. Unlike some people, I'm not getting free products to review, and my time is worth something to me.
I don't know, I bought Magnilife leg and back for my leg and was VERY impressed with results and gave a VERY glowing review. They emailed that it was rejected and I should try again. I wonder if I made a claim that made it sound miraculous or something. (But they temporarily helped me.) Or maybe I said something scientifically that would not hold up? I don't like unnecessary emails and they were sending thank you's after each review so I stopped giving them.
I've read the same infuriating blather. The weird thing is that some reviews were [supposedly] not published because they talked about shipping issues, which have a place to rant about other than the Product Review section. Yet there are lots of rants as you described in the Product Review section. Edit to add: There were also folks who said that book reviews were one area where repression of comments happened all the time, because they seemed to be from friends & family promoting those books. One person inferred that Amazon has some way of knowing who is affiliated with the author (supposedly some creepy cyber way of determining six degrees of separation.) But no evidence was cited to support that claim.
Oh, I'm sure they do. Even several years ago, when my wife and I both had dozens of websites up, with affiliate marketing and other schemes for making money from them, all of which depended on doing well in the search engine results, there was an advantage when another website would link to ours, and that advantage was magnified many times when the linking site was not also one of ours. In Google Webmaster Tools (if they still have that, I haven't logged into my Webmaster Tools account in years), Google would list sites that you were affiliated with. Despite my registering the domain under another name, from another IP address, and hosting it on another hosting plan, Google would know - every time - whether or not I was associated with a site, and would even be able to link my wife's sites up to mine. Scarier yet, Google knows my passwords for every site I visit, because I get notifications from them every now and then about how I have used the same or similar passwords for different logins, and they will list my passwords by site. I can't think of a Google product that I use, and I don't even use Google's search engine, yet they know my passwords. That's scary. I have a gmail address, but I rarely use it and it's not associated with any of my logins. Back on topic, I have rarely given a product less than three stars, given that I consider that a book isn't necessarily useless or absolutely boring just because I didn't enjoy it, and many of the cat foods that my cats wouldn't eat nevertheless show good ingredients and would likely be good choices for people whose cats would eat it. Nevertheless, if I rave about a product, there seems to be very little chance of it being rejected, while if I have problems with it and speak of it in my review, there is a greater chance that it will be rejected. I don't so much care whether my reviews show up on Amazon as I do that I haven't wasted my time writing the review, to begin with - and, as someone who reads reviews before ordering a product, I'd like to know that it doesn't have a whole lot of good reviews only because the bad ones are rejected.