Seibertron.com Energon Pub Forums

capellamusic wrote:Sure, and I'll answer the best I can to the last posts later after coming back from work. Tonight (Portugal time) I'll do both starting with the pictures. I already took some pictures the other day before I did anything on the figure (e.g. cleaning the dirt spots), and I'll be placing a reprolabels rub sign later since I have a few of those and so at least I can fill the empty place with a similar one.

Hello Artur,

It is your right posting your complaints, and I am not going to shift responsibility. But since we both can't track who opened the toy box and I also unable find who packed your toy before, entangling this issue is usless now. Nevertheless, I want to say Hasbro produce action figure toys not handicraft articles and we are retailer not manufacturer and can't guarantee every toy is perfect. Despite we understand most Transformers buyer are collector and have high standard requirements on box condition(MISB and even 10C is prefered) and we also did many effort on checking the toy box and the packing job to ensure the toy to be protected well from one country to another country, but who could say there is no 1% or 0.1% mistake? Also I don't belive any factory in the world produce defect free product all the time. So, I think address on how to resolve the problem is more realistic.

Whell, if you don't want send it back and get exchange, 30% refund (45.99 x 0.3 = 13.98). If you aggree with this solution, money will be credited to you PayPal account later.

Thanks and best regards

Hi,

(please read everything, thank you)

Thank you for understanding and for trying to compensate for this issue. Unfortunately it's true that neither of us can be sure of anything from either side as we can only state our positions on the matter without undoubtful evidence. I have my conscience clear that everything I said is true and I say this because after seibertron.com's owner wrote on the forum where I was discussing this with other people it seemed to me they are questioning that what I said may not be true and that I could be trying to take advantage. And I can't blame them for that because let's face it, who am I? I'm just some random anonymous user on their site, and you're one of their sponsors and you have a position with your store. Of course I'm the hardest to be believed, but my conscience is clear as all I said is true and I don't see the point on spending all this time with this if it wasn't true. For a few bucks? I don't think it would be worth it (and if I wanted to take advantage it would have been wiser to buy something more worth it, like a Masterpiece). I'm just defending my position as a buyer not having received what he bought in the condition it should be. My intention isn't to take advantage of anyone or to attack your store. I don't see the point in that. I think it's harder for a buyer to be believed on an issue like this than the store is to be believed, because the buyer is a random anonymous person while the store has status. Would I really spend all this time and all this effort if I was lying?

But I'll take your word on this issue, I'm accepting that it wasn't your fault for this to happen. And so, considering that, you're in your right to take my word or not. With that said I'll leave the parcial refund of 30% decision up to you. If you believe me and decide to do it I say thank you for trying to compensate for the issue. If you think I'm lying and trying to take advantage, so be it, there's not much I can do. Unfortunately it's very hard to prove something like this from either side. I won't complain anymore either way and I end this issue from my part here. As for the option of returning the item, I don't think it would be fair that I would have to pay the extra shipping to correct something which wasn't my fault. I think it's better to keep an opened one than paying extra expenses to get a replacement. If the case was more severe, i.e. the toy was damaged beyond an easy repair, that would make more sense for an exchange overseas. It's not the same as going to a local store to request a replacement.

I want to add that when I went to seibertron.com and created the thread discussing this issue my first intention was to try to understand if this figure was really used (since it was opened) and if was legit. I never had this one before, so I didn't know for example that it didn't have a sticker sheet but actually came with all stickers on the figure from factory. That was one of the doubts I had just because it was opened.

I do want to apologize for one thing, which is that I may have seemed a bit harsh, but this really left me very upset and I wasn't expecting it. I even wrote on the order comments requesting that the item would be well packed because I wanted to have it displayed on the box (you can probably check that since it's on my order history). I was considering leaving it sealed at least until the TakaraTomy Encore line ends as they may also reissue this figure again. Because it came unsealed I can't do that now. That's also a reason for me being so upset with this.

I'll post your last answer as well as this email on the seibertron.com thread where I was discussing this with other people, so that they can see the issue has been dealt with, with a proper answer. I'll also be posting photos I took the other day showing the absense of rub sign, etc., since seibertron.com's owner requested them.

Best regards

I have my conscience clear that everything I said is true and I say this because after seibertron.com's owner wrote on the forum where I was discussing this with other people it seemed to me they are questioning that what I said may not be true and that I could be trying to take advantage. And I can't blame them for that because let's face it, who am I? I'm just some random anonymous user on their site, and you're one of their sponsors and you have a position with your store. Of course I'm the hardest to be believed, but my conscience is clear as all I said is true and I don't see the point on spending all this time with this if it wasn't true.

Seibertron wrote:I am obviously not in control of how the sponsors on my site run their businesses. However, I am in control of what advertisers are allowed to sponsor this site. I am watching this thread carefully, as I try to watch all threads carefully when it comes to sponsors on this site.

I am concerned about immediately jumping down YaHobby's throat, which seems to be prevalent in this thread. I'm trying to put myself in the shoes of the sponsors to consider what I would do in their shoes in this situation. As of this moment, I'm not sure what I would do. I've have always been concerned about the possibility of becoming a retailer and verifying what scams I would encounter with purchasers and myself.

Playing "devil's advocate" ... looking at this from Yahobby's perspective (or any other retailer for that matter), how would the advertiser know that you didn't open the package and insert a faulty product from another company? How does a SMALL retailer handle that issue? I know how major US retailers such as Target and Walmart handle this situation (they just immediately take back the item), however, that is NOT how small businesses operate (nor is it fair to SMALL businesses to operate in that manner).

In my opinion, it would be an extraordinary stance if a retailer would try to scam a customer like this. It doesn't make sense from a business stand point. For a moment, please consider their accused role in this matter. What would they possibly gain from swapping out the product shipped to you with a secondary product or a used product? $10? $20? Original versions of Perceptor don't go for a lot on the secondary market. The original accusation in this thread doesn't even make sense from a business perspective. It wouldn't be profitable in the least to them.

My problem with "MISB" items that have been "opened" is this ... we're talking about a piece of tape. Last I checked, tape was easily ripped, torn, worn, etc. What's to say that the tape on an item wasn't accidentally cut or something simply because the box landed on something the wrong way or maybe the box cutter cut the tape or some other weird circumstance? I can think of a variety of ways of how the tape on a packaged toy could become damaged. I've also received many toys over the years with "damaged" tape where the tape is "cut" or "broken" yet the item inside is absolutely perfect.

However, this is not the case with this situation. From what I have gathered in this thread, minus the "broken" tape seal, it appears to be simply factory issues, which I wouldn't blame on YaHobby, but rather on the Hasbro factory. The weapons and the stickers both seem to be equivalent to what everyone else has received with their Perceptor reissues. To the best of my knowledge, no version of the G1 Perceptor mold has ever had a sticker sheet. The stickers have always been applied, which is why the stickers always seem to be "complete" or "perfect" on loose specimens of the Perceptor toy. The discrepancies on his missile launcher simply has to do with whether or not it's the Takara version or the Hasbro version.

How much responsibilty does YaHobby have to faulty products received from manufacturers? I haven't read their return policy but I would be curious to know what they have stated in their policies regarding situations like this. I'm sure factory mishaps are a common problem in this industry.

I am definitely trying to play "devil's advocate" in this thread. Of all of the thousands of Transformers that I have purchased online over the past 11 years, I haven't ever returned a figure. That doesn't mean that I haven't received faulty products, I'm just one of those people that rarely returns a product, especially when I deal with overseas retailers. I'm curious to hear what other people have to say regarding this issue.

I guess all I'm trying to do is defend a retailer that most likely is not at fault in this situation, however, their customer service might be a little lacking. Looking forward to responses ...

Delicon wrote:Here's my two cents.

First of all, if a major online retailer doesn't take care of you properly, it is good to let your fellow collectors know about this in a courteous manner. However, it seems like you started this thread and started firing away at them before you gave them the proper time to respond.

I think their eventual response could have been worded better but they did offer you an exchange, which should count for something. I would have lobbied gently for them to cover my return shipping costs, but they probably also have standard policies on such things.

My guess is they have probaboly been burned a few times by scammers so take that into consideration as well.

Best of luck to you and I hope you find a happy resolution. It sucks to not get what you pay for.

First Gen wrote:This is a hard one. At the one end, you have the customer, who is clearly not satisfied with his/her product, and on the other, you have a rather reputable online retailer who isn't known for "bad transactions" but may or may not have sent less than mint items on a mint sale.

But I do agree that it is the responsiblity of the seller to verify all items being sent if they are sold as "mint" or "collectors grade". Right now Yahobby has to take you for your word, and its best to try the "honey with bees" approach before trying to threaten a business, cause as Seibertron said, Yahobby really doesn't stand to gain from this situation financially. So give them a chance to make this right with you and if it does turn out that they are trying to pull a fast one, I'm sure further action will be sought.

Let's not pass judgement on anyone until both sides have been able to discuss their perspectives completely. Ok?

Seibertron wrote:If I were you, I would take them up on the item exchange. I think that's fair. If you don't think that is fair, what type of resolution are you looking from them?

Savage wrote:You do realise that cleaning the figure and adding stickers is probably a very bad idea if you want any sort of refund or exchange, right?

Forgotten wrote:Never dealt with yahobby, looked on their website a couple times and never found any great deals or figures I couldn't get from toyarena or robotkingdom. I wish you the best of luck in getting some satisfaction, but I have to say I agree with Seibertron, a replacement sounds like a good offer to me. I know paying to ship it back to them sucks, but that is a necessary evil. I build & repair computers for a livng, I order ALL my parts from online dealers, some small, some large. On occasion I get DOA/defective parts and have to pay to ship for RMAs, it's just the way things are. If you sweet talk them real nice they may help with shipping by giving you a small refund or something, but they can't be expected to do everything. Just my 2 cents.

First Gen wrote:Man even the instructions look old.

Dude email them back and tell them you want a new one. That figure is horrible.

Seibertron wrote:

First Gen wrote:Man even the instructions look old.

Dude email them back and tell them you want a new one. That figure is horrible.

They already offered to exchange the figure back at the beginning of this topic.

Forgotten wrote:Capellamusic, I want to clearly state that I do not believe that you are trying to pull a fast one on yahobby, because as you said, there's not enough to gain to bother. i'm not a MISB collector myself, I must free them from ALL their plastic prisons, but that's because I love fiddling with them so. After looking at the pics you posted I have to agree that it looks used, I can't see that much stuff getting through QC. I'm no expert so I can't offer anything but my opinion(even though I worked a quality control job once, lasted about a month before I was sick of it.) I hope that you can get it to a satisfactory state for your display. As far as paying to ship it back for a replacement, i'm sorry that's the way it is, but EVERY place I buy from online I have to do that with. It's just internet policy I guess.

Seibertron wrote:I'm not questioning the validity of your situation, I am questioning the need for a thread like this attacking a sponsor after they have already offered to resolve your situation with an exchange. I got involved in this thread because it involves one of the members of my website and one of the sponsors of my website and I saw other members on my site attacking Yahobby because of this topic after I made a news post yesterday about some new products that Yahobby received in stock.

I understand that you are frustrated, as would I in your shoes. I want to make sure that both the sponsors and the users on my site are being fair to each other. That's all I'm looking for. In this situation, I think you should've gone with their offer to exchange the item. If you did receive a faulty item, I think it sucks. It's happened to me before. It's kind of a gamble with purchasing things online.

Was just looking through the pictures ... wasn't quite sure what I was looking at in some of the pictures because they are so large. Is the chrome damaged on his chest? Are the stickers worn in some of the photos?

Seriously, take them up on the exchange. Get rid of that figure. Pay the extra $10 to get another one shipped.

capellamusic wrote:It's not just $10, it's probably about $25-$30 in total considering shipping to them and back to me again.

Forgotten wrote:They should pay to ship the replacement to you, that's what all the places i've dealt with did, I pay to ship to them, they pay to ship to me.

capellamusic wrote:
Anyway, this are my doubts about it:

1) No rub sign anywhere. I've seen videos on YouTube reviewing this figure and I've seen it's supposed to be one on its left leg, but there's no rub sign, anywhere... I've also looked well on the box and it really isn't there

2) In every video and picture I saw, the leg stickers had the small triangle inside the red rectangle both to the outside and on mine it's facing the inside, i.e. the stickers are switched. The only thing mine came with, besides the box and guns and missiles, were the instructions. There was no sticker sheet and all stickers were already on the figure. On the instructions it doesn't show how to apply the stickers, so I'm unsure if this is supposed to come with a sticker sheet or with the stickers already on the figure, like mine came. Did yours come with a sticker sheet?

3) How were the finishing touches on your figure? Were they near perfect? I ask this because mine has a few bits missing on the chrome, has some bits of dirt in the legs and the stickers have bits damaged where they seem used.

4) Looking through the lenses I see black dots of dirt in side. Does yours come like that?

5) Is there any good quality Perceptor KO that looks a lot like the original? I don't think this is a KO, it looks too legit, but with all this I'm thinking about everything...

Hello Artur,

I saw your thread on Seibertron.com and I think the discussion is enough so I don't want to repeat. It's ture that you got a defective product from us and very dissatisfied. But I don't understand that from your first email you repeated the similar words through all your email that you are disappointed, your are regret to buy. And you firmly belive that apart from us no one will open the box, in fact, you assume we sent you the opened toy intentionally. Then you wrote a thread on Seibertron.com at lightning speed. Meanwhile you neither send us pictures nor give us time to answer you the solution. That's why I feel that it's not fair to us. Also, I just wondered, for example, if you used to share the information to all your neighbors if you just bought a book which missing a few pages before you contact the book store. If you think it's a good communication method, it dries me up. Keep your great tactics and use to deal with your future bussiness partner and good luck.

Back to the issue, after reviewed your pictures the toy is not brand new and have defect you will receive a full refund(not including shipping). You will receive money credited soon.

Thanks and best regards
Goodbye

Hi,

Firstly, thank you for understanding and solving the issue. I appreciate that you refunded the full price of the toy, although I really disagree as only a parcial refund would be fair. A full refund of the price of it isn't fair at all for you, you didn't have to go that further to compensate for this.

Since this was an unintentional mistake I understand that you feel the way I dealt with it to be unfair, but thank you for taking the time read the thread in order to solve this. Unfortunately this was unpleasent for both, and I suggest that the products should at least always be checked if they are sealed before being packaged to be shipped so that things like this can be avoided in future.

Back to the thread, I already said this there, but my first intention was to try to understand if apart from having come opened if it also was used (at that time I thought it should have a sticker sheet and that the stickers had been applied after being opened, for example), and if there was any chance it could have been a high quality KO packed in a legit box. And I didn't need to wait for answer from you to check that out from other people since it was about the product itself. When a person receives something opened which he never had he doesn't know how the contents should come. My mistake was that due to being so upset about this I also talked about your store before receiving your answer. Fair enough, I do apologize for that, I should first have only cleared my doubts about the figure. But you know that when a person thinks he got scammed he'll be so upset that he will say everything assuming the worst.

When I first contacted you it didn't even occurred to me to send you the pictures, sorry, and I actually only placed them on the thread after the site's owner requested.

When you ask if I use to share this kind of information with my neighbors since I wrote on that forum I answer like this: it's not a matter of talking to "neighbors", but rather to talk to people in the same community, that have that same interest, and may use the same store. I think it's for the best of all that bad experiences are shared. It's not your case, but for example there are many con online stores out there and many people write on community forums about that to warn others (when I got scammed on ioffer I wrote about it to warn people on seibertron.com and tfw2005.com, and that one got pretty clear that it was a scam indeed, many people fell for it, but some were saved in time as they saw what I and others said). That already also saved me from using con sites before, so I think it really is worth it to share bad experiences not with the neighbors, but with people with the same interests. If I had a neighbor that likes anime and I found out that some online anime store was a fraud or had many people complaining about issues of course I would warn him. The problem with us was that I may have acted too quickly as a rollercoaster on the thread after wanting to clear my doubts at first. But I think people should never shut up about the issues they face and sharing info can help other like I exemplified.

Your sentence about "Keep your great tactics(...)" isn't very friendly and it isn't what this is, but I see why you're upset.

So, to end this, I say again thank you for solving the issue and I apologize for what I did wrong to try to solve it. I'm just going to add this to the thread as I think it's fair that people see that you did more than had to to solve this, and that it was an unintentional mistake and people can trust your store. But the amount you refunded is unfair to you.

Best regards

Delicon wrote:

capellamusic wrote:It's not just $10, it's probably about $25-$30 in total considering shipping to them and back to me again.

Forgotten wrote:They should pay to ship the replacement to you, that's what all the places i've dealt with did, I pay to ship to them, they pay to ship to me.

A lot of places do that, actually. I would e-mail them and see if they would cover at least one end of the shipping. I have a feeling they might.

capellamusic wrote:I have received an answer from yahobby.com. They said the following:

Hello Artur,

Sorry for delay. I am sorry that you are unhappy with your purchase from YaHobby.com.
But there are a couple of things I must explain.
Unless otherwise specified, all products we selling are authentic and brand new from Hasbro factory or Takara Tomy Japan.
We never sell used items. But since the shipping is a long journey, somethings is out of our control.
For example, occasionally, packages damaged during the shipped or opened due to Customs inspection.

But from your case, we will check the item more carefully before shipping in the future.

About the opend box and missed the rub-sign, our solution is 30% refund (shipping is not included) or item exchange (you have to send the defect item back to us first).

Thanks very much for your patient

It Is Him wrote:This thread has revealed two things about Yahobby that still creates legitimate concern for me as a shopper:

1) Either the customer service rep does not know what their store has in stock, or he flat out lied when he said YaHobby doesn't sell used items (they sell animated loose toys) or authentic Hasbro/TT toys (they list several KOs).

2) Multiple customers have received products that were not in their advertised conditions. capellamusic's case is not an isolated incident.

If YaHobby wanted to keep their customers happy, they should go the extra mile and comp the exchange shipping... even if it is international. Though, I'll give them credit for offering a 30% refund. That's more than BBTS offered me on an item I wasn't entirely happy with.

Delicon wrote:It is Him, since Capellamusic considers the issue resolved and Yahobby does as well, why all the negativity still? If you truly work for an online retailer as you claim, I'm sure your own employer has had unhappy customers from time to time, haven't they? Mistakes happen but Yahobby obviously went the extra mile and keept listening well beyond when a lot of others would have stopped.

It Is Him wrote:

Delicon wrote:It is Him, since Capellamusic considers the issue resolved and Yahobby does as well, why all the negativity still? If you truly work for an online retailer as you claim, I'm sure your own employer has had unhappy customers from time to time, haven't they? Mistakes happen but Yahobby obviously went the extra mile and keept listening well beyond when a lot of others would have stopped.

I'm just restating my concerns about this seller. Mistakes happen. They did attempt to rectify them, but if I were capellamusic, I would not be satisfied and I would not repeat my business. Their customer service is lousy.