Ebuyer lures you in with false assrances that are displayed prominantly, and then hides behind minimum statutory law. Internet

Ebuyer has a pretty clean, slick looking website designed to inspire confidence.  The homepage is riddled with logos from supposed consumer protection organizations that they claim to be affiliated with and bold promises to the consumer--promises that, if true, offer considerable value to the would-be consumer that cannot be obtained from other online retailers.

The problem is that all the promises are an online bait-and-switch marketing tactic.  They say you can cancel an order anytime before it is shipped, for example, but when you try and do that they will ignore the request, send it anyway, and refuse to pay to have the item returned to them even though they were well aware it should not have been sent in the first place.  They say an item is in stock when it is not, and will not notify the customer that an item is not stock leaving the consumer high and dry for as long as it takes (which could be a month or more) until the consumer wears out their customer-service department with demands to have the order cancelled.  On the site the potential customer is promised that problems will be dealt with without hassle, but in reality the formula Ebuyer operates under is that until it looks like they might lose a bit of money on customer service man-hours, they are not going to do so much as respond to your emails or shrug you off on the telephone.  They promise lots of things on the website, and then when you write to them and make things real when there is a problem they are obligated to fix, they point out the national statutory laws that any business must observe, which are a far cry from what they advertised to you on their website.  They hide behind those minimal laws and refuse to honour the marketing they used to attract you as a customer.  A classic bait-and-switch.

The organizations they say they are affiliated with, unsurprisingly, do not seem to be affiliated with any other online retailers I can find, causing me to think they are either wholey made up or they themselves run the organizations and plaster logos all over their website to give a false sense of security.  I sent an email to one of them saying I was having a problem with ebuyer.  I actually got a response that said they let ebuyer know there was a problem and I was asked to keep them updated.  I sent my next email stating Ebuyer's response to my raising an issue with them.  Ebuyer closed my account so that I could not access the evidence of what had happened (ebuyer uses enotes which are held entirely on their own servers rather than email which can be accessed independently without the use of their site) to hide all correspondence and timestamps of what happened and when it happened.  I recieved no reply.  I emailed again asking them to respond just so I could know they were real.  No replies.  None.  The organizations ebuyer claims to be assiciated with are not actually consumer advocacy organizations, they are just a front for ebuyer.

To be fair, I have had orders work with ebuyer before.  I've ordered about 7 or 8 things.  With 3 of them there were problems that needed to be addressed.  The others were as simple as I ordered and sometime later the products arrived.  But providing money and actually getting a product as described is the bare minimum of what any sane consumer would expect to actually engage in a transaction.  It is the times when things are not right that tells us the real metal of a business.  And those times are too frequent and handled too poorly to recommmend Ebuyer to anyone.  They are dishonest and if things are not easy for them, their response is basically "screw you."