Insurance Company Offering eBay Insurance
from the you-can-insure-anything... dept
Everyone has heard about various eBay scams, and it’s making people increasingly nervous to buy or sell products on the site. So, along comes an insurance company to try to help alleviate some of the problems. They’re offering a form of eBay insurance, though it might not work the way you would expect. It’s targeted at eBay power sellers who are willing to give up a small percentage of each sale for the right to display a “BuySafe” logo. The logo is supposed to link to a site that will verify that the logo has been approved. The insurance company (Hartford) then insures that the buyer will either receive the good – or the money they paid for the good will be returned. Of course, they’ll only handle claims that occur within 30 days of the sale, so if the seller keeps telling you to hang on a little while longer, you might be out of luck. Also, eBay offers their own service like this, but the fine print is a killer. While the service promises to refund up to $1,000, it isn’t $1,000 per purchase, but $1,000 per seller. So, if (as did happen) a seller with such a logo scams people out of a million dollars, the company would split $1,000 among all the victims. Not particularly comforting.
Comments on “Insurance Company Offering eBay Insurance”
buySAFE - "a form of eBay insurance"
Hi Mike. I appreciate your concerns about our service. You are right that the various scams which have occurred on eBay/other sites make many buyers too nervous to make purchases online. Our service, buySAFE with The Hartford, exists to solve this problem and also bring more buyers to the marketplace, increasing the number of bidders and bid prices that sellers can achieve. There is one thing I want to clarify about your post, however.
Referencing your quote, “…they’ll only handle claims that occur within 30 days of the sale, so if the seller keeps telling you to hang on a little while longer, you might be out of luck,” I’d like to say that we DO have a way to deal with this issue. If a buyer hasn’t recieved his/her purchase at day 28 or day 29/30, but doesn’t want to give up on the seller yet, he/she can, and is in fact encouraged to, report the problem transaction on our site in the Service Center. This will extend the life of the bond (protection) without officially beginning the Claims process yet. This will allow the buyer to give the seller more time to deliver without sacrificing the protection our service provides.
I hope this helps. Please feel free to contact me at julie@buysafe.com for any more clarification.