The Kind of Seller I Will Never Deal With

A Scanlines Anecdote: Why I Never Buy From Indie Game Shops

One of my favourite parts of retro gaming is using Ebay and I mean that sincerely. You never know what you’re going to find and who you’re going to deal with.

In my several years of building a retro console and game collection I’ve had the great pleasure of dealing with some wonderful people on Ebay: the guy who sold me my current N64 bundled in a load of stickers, a handwritten note and was upfront about the barely visible hole in the console’s shell on the back. Then there was my pristine copy of Sim City on the SNES, sold by a kind lady who was excited to see a family treasure go to a new home and the guy who sold me my replacement Dreamcast disc drive undersold the condition it was in and was basically giving it away. What a legend.

Then there are the other people… the time-wasters, the excuse makers and the dodgy-cartridge peddlers; for some reason or another, every time I’ve had a bad experience on Ebay it was through an independent game shop.

First, there was the guy who sold me a broken copy of Super Mario Sunshine who, despite me testing it on my Wii, my Gamecube, cleaning the disc and taking a picture of my screen with both consoles failing to read the game, threw a tantrum because I gave him Neutral feedback (when he really deserved Negative) and tried to claim I broke the disc on purpose and necessitated me getting Ebay to pry my cash back from his greasy hands.

Then there was the Wii-U man, who despatched the item 10 days after I ordered it and 7 days after I asked him to cancel the order, who mysteriously only saw my message after I took his pretty blatant ignoring of my messages up with Ebay, who got him to pay the postage of sending it back and made sure I could actually get the details to do so.

Another experience I had was buying a bunch of ‘restored’ Sega Megadrive controllers. Not only were they filthy with one having a broken D-[ad and the rest having mushy buttons but the idiots in this shop had put tamper-proof stickers on them threatening to void the warranty if they were opened; we’ll call that the DK Oldies method. Worse, once peeled they were sticky and horrible and clearing the gunk off scratched up the backs of these gamepads really bad.

Anti-tamper stickers on almost 40 year old hardware you’re selling second-hand, you can’t make this shit up.

I don’t know what has given independent game shop owners in the UK the confidence to pursue the most asinine business tactics but it hasn’t done them any favours; I buy the majority of my stuff from CEX now and any Ebay seller who’s running a shop instead of selling games he found in a cardboard box in his garage I instantly avoid.

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