ebay vs digital games

[DinoDerek]

Has anyone ever tried to scam you, and if so how did things turn out? Would love to hear about any problems you've encountered selling digital goods and how you solved them.

As a side note; Someone else actually tried to scam me just a few days ago on ebay, but the were really obvious about it (zero feedback, account made that day, contacted me saying their paypal address was wrong and to send it somewhere else).

Ive sold on Ebay for over a decade pretty heavily. Maybe 10,000 transactions over the years from collecting, a bit reselling etc so you kinda learn tricks, you pick up on little things...

That said no, never been scammed for a code and its likely due to the tiny extra effort of shipping the code. Doesn't sound like much but a tracking number makes their life just hard enough to avoid an issue.

[EternalB]

Ive sold on Ebay for over a decade pretty heavily. Maybe 10,000 transactions over the years from collecting, a bit reselling etc so you kinda learn tricks, you pick up on little things...

That said no, never been scammed for a code and its likely due to the tiny extra effort of shipping the code. Doesn't sound like much but a tracking number makes their life just hard enough to avoid an issue.

I've been scammed. It was uplay code and ubisoft could do nothing about it even though I still had the physical card. Made the mistake of not shipping it. My case, was a little more unique too as the charge back came do to the result that the used credit card was stolen. Apparently someone had their ebay account hacked. It was also issued through PayPal and not ebay. While they are kind of the same company, there are some loopholes via PayPal that override eBay's policies.

[Tubsiwub]

My biggest problem with selling online is the freakin' mail service. A few times now they've "lost my package" and have been "looking into it" ever since. Not a single case has been resolved, and the buyer never got their item.

I lose the item and the sale, the buyer never gets what they want, and some mail dude most likely is chuckling at how his job comes with benefits. Due to these hassles, I'd never sell something intangible like a download code online, but with physical items I try to make sure to put extra item info inside the box/envelopes from now on, super-tape the package and pay for better shipping when the item's value is worth more than just a few dollars of profit.

[xelement5x]

I've had decent luck with the times I've needed to sell so far. I need to let go of quite a lot of stuff in the next 6 months or so I think though, so hopefully I don't get burned.

[mandy_moorehol]

If eBay and digital games got into a fight I would hope for no survivors.

[KrownKlown]

I'm not 100% sure on Origin and Uplay, but on Steam it is possible to revoke a key. The person with the game will get a message saying that there was a problem processing the payment.

Generic picture of the message from google images:

This isn't comforting nor does this make buying/selling digital on steam appealing if the seller can pull it like that. People can still get scammed but now it falls back on the buyer.

[Fabrizo1]

Yea it goes both ways; buyers can scam sellers, but sellers can also scam buyers.

As far as sellers pulling the key though, its not something they can do regularly because the places they buy from will likely take notice of them if they do (assuming they source their keys from legit stores like Humble Bundle, BundleStars, etc.). The sellers you need to look out for are the ones who get their games from G2A or Kinguin (or any other grey market resale site where the sellers commonly use stolen credit cards), because even if they're legit the people they get their games may very well not be.

The PC gaming scene is absolutely full of scumbags; buyers stealing from sellers (why this thread was created), sellers stealing from buyers (normally with stolen credit cards on G2A), and even developers that do asset flips / greenlight boosting / review boosting / etc.