Cases the vendor caused

The vendor is the only party in this arrangement who is a person you deal with directly. That produces a particular kind of error, which is that their failures get read as the system failing and the system failures get read as them.

Six cases sit here. All six are decisions made by a person, and none of them are things a market could have prevented.

The six

• It was never sent in the first place the postal service gets the blame
• The listing said less than you read into it the market gets the blame
• The replies stopped coming the messaging system gets the blame
• The packing was careless the journey gets the blame
• The vendor left and did not put a note on the door the whole market gets the blame
• You were asked to step outside escrow the market gets the blame afterwards

What belongs to a vendor and what does not

Their goods, their prices, their preparation, their dispatch and their communication. That is all of it.

Fees are not theirs. Escrow rules are not theirs. Dispute windows are not theirs. Whether the site is reachable is not theirs. A complaint about any of those is being aimed at somebody with no ability to act on it, and the vendor knows that, which is why the reply feels evasive.

The pattern of the six

Five of them look at first glance like something impersonal. The post lost it. The system ate the message. Transit was rough. The market is collapsing. Only the last one, the request to step outside escrow, arrives clearly as a human act, and that is exactly why it is the easiest one to judge correctly.

The others require the reader to notice that a person made a decision somewhere behind an impersonal looking outcome. That is a harder thing to see and it takes longer, which is unfortunate, because most of these come with a window attached.

Windows

Four of these six cases have a deadline inside them. A dispute window closes. Escrow releases. The clock is running from the moment the order is placed and it does not pause while you are being patient.

That makes vendor cases the most time sensitive on the site. A market case can usually wait a day. A network case resolves itself. A vendor case that gets diagnosed late is often a vendor case that cannot be acted on at all, and correctness after the window has closed is worth nothing.

Most vendors are not the problem

A section listing six vendor failures reads as an indictment and it is not meant as one. The great majority of orders go through with nobody doing anything wrong, which is why these cases stand out enough to be written about.

The reason to keep the list is that the failures cluster. A vendor who packs carelessly does it every time. A vendor who writes vaguely writes vaguely on every listing. A vendor who asks you to step outside escrow once will ask again. Almost none of these are one off events, which means the signal is worth collecting early and acting on quickly.

That is the practical use of this section. Not suspicion of everybody, but recognising a repeating pattern the first time rather than the third.

• Every case in one table
• What you can actually observe
• What a wrong attribution costs