Confused by an old feedback comment accusing me of not paying for a month and something about it just feels off was looking through my old eBay feedback and found one comment from about a year ago that I genuinely do not remember.
The seller wrote something along the lines of: ““🔥🔥🔥 BUYERS BEWARE!!!” Buyer never paid me, said money was coming and kept me on hold. Could have sold some of them in the month I waited for her to pay. She’s horrible & mean spirited.”
What confuses me is that I have no memory of asking a seller to hold an item for a month (and that's not something I would do anyway) while I tried to pay for it. That would also be very unlike how I normally use eBay. The rest of my feedback is overwhelmingly things like “prompt payment,” “great communication,” “smooth transaction,” etc.
I’m not posting this because I’m angry at the seller or because I want anyone to go after them. I’m genuinely trying to reconstruct what happened or make sense of why this feels so off to me, like almost AI off.
The listing is old enough that I can’t open it anymore, so I don’t even know what the item was. I also can’t find any messages between myself and the seller.
A couple of things particularly confuse me:
The feedback appears with the positive-feedback symbol and says “Verified purchase,” even though the written comment says I never paid. I know sellers can’t leave buyers normal negative feedback, so is this just a seller leaving a negative comment under positive feedback?
Would an unpaid/cancelled transaction still show as a “Verified purchase” in feedback?
Is there any way to retrieve enough information from an old item number/order history to find out what the transaction actually was?
Is there some eBay scenario I’m overlooking where a buyer could appear to be keeping a seller waiting for payment even if there was a payment problem, combined order, agreed delayed payment, etc.?
And most of all the 🔥 emojis and “BUYERS BEWARE!!!,” which struck me as unusually dramatic for eBay feedback.
It then says I never paid, supposedly told the seller money was coming, and kept them waiting for about a month. The part that puzzles me most is that it ends by calling me “horrible & mean spirited.” That sounds as though there was some kind of personal argument or interaction, but I genuinely don’t remember anything like that, and I can’t find any old messages explaining it.
Another odd detail: the seller refers to me as “she.” I don’t have a profile picture of myself, I don’t remember ever discussing my gender with this seller, and my name is extremely uncommon and is traditionally masculine, so I’m not sure how they would have arrived at that assumption.
Could this possibly have been feedback intended for another buyer, or is there some information sellers could have seen at the time that I’m forgetting about?
I’m not accusing the seller of lying or saying the feedback must be wrong. I’m genuinely trying to figure out what transaction this refers to and whether experienced sellers recognize anything unusual about the way this feedback was left.
I’m debating politely messaging the seller and asking if they remember what happened, but before bothering someone about a year-old transaction I thought I’d ask experienced sellers whether there’s an obvious explanation in the way eBay handles feedback/orders.
Again, I’m not trying to dispute somebody’s experience based purely on my memory. I just find the comment strange enough, and so inconsistent with my normal transaction history, that I’d like to understand what happened.is there a way to figure out what happened?
I suppose too that if there really is nothing to be done about it, I'm fine with that. It's just very odd and I feel slightly unsettled.
