This might be a stupid question but i just had this experience with a seller, essentially i paid a certain price for 2 items, as the hours went by the seller contacted me saying they have to cancel because they can’t get the items for the price they listed, did i essentially just pay this person for nothing?
I’m very concerned how something like this could be allowed.
Maybe the seller is out of stock for that item. He probably forgot to remove the listing.
Unfortunately not the case, they messaged me saying that the price had gone up for the item so they couldn’t get it for the price they listed, thankfully i was fully refunded but it’s still concerning that people can sell something that don’t actually have available.
Umm, what was the item, the code or in-game item?
They were both digital game codes.
Old problem. I wrote about it many times here and that’s a reason I never buy and don’t support sellers of digital game codes that don’t sell as instant delivery.
It’s a safe and unfair business. Every seller can list bunch of games, even AAA titles, waiting for someone to bite, and then buy it elsewhere for cheaper before delivering. It’s good practice for them, but bad for this site and other sellers. It’s bad for the site, because nobody will come back to buy more from Gameflip after such a bad experience. For other sellers is bad, because it’s easy to spam over our listings with something they don’t have. They can even offer better price for something if there is no risk of loosing money (they will never spend on a game if nobody buys it).
That’s why I’m still standing behind my suggestion to prevent this type of things by limiting every user to have max 5 non-instant (digital) items at the time.
I’m just glad it only occurred with 2 items (From the same seller), i’m new to the site so i assumed that all listings were items that the seller actually owned (For the most part this is probably the case), honestly the fault is mostly on me for not realizing these kind of things could happen, it would be a different story if i wasn’t fully refunded but was definitely a negative experience and made me avoid that seller in future for sure.
This is not a stupid question at all, TheRhysWyril.
The answer is pretty much what Pedja_Erakovic said: it is VERY COMMON and 100% tolerated that sellers create tenths of adverstisements for items that they do not have just to fill several pages of items as a “free adverstisement”. So although being frowned upon by the rest of the community, no harm has ever come to those that do so every week.
There were even printscreens posted some time ago of some of those sellers confessing that they resell from some shady websites as soon as they receive a purchase order on Gameflip (e.g.: as they receive the purchase order they google and buy wherever the key is cheaper). That’s the reason why I very rarely buy non-auto delivery items on Gameflip.
Oh and once I read someone wondering here “what would happen if several people bought all those items at the same time and the seller clearly didn’t have as many items as advertised?”. The answer is quite simple: said seller would just cancel the surplus purchase orders and blame it on the buyers saying that they requested the order to be cancelled.
I’ve faced a reseller doing this last week and absolutely nothing happened to him.
I second that, by the way.
Although some sellers could be 100% legit and they get their stuff from a trusted source, and the reason behind this is they operate under a low budget, im still very against filling the store with tens or hundreds of listings of the same item if they don’t have it on hand.
Anyway I still tend to stay away from those kind of sellers. I only buy items with instant delivery and I also use that as a filter when searching for an item.
it’s against the rule … but i don’t think gameflip care enough for that… but it’s def against the rules to post an item that you don’t have it stocked in your inventory.
Hello guys, thanks for raising this up. I’ll talk to the team about this to see what can be done.
Thanks