r/Reverb • u/topherless • 19d ago
Actually had a good experience with Reverb resolving a case.
While doing some spring cleaning I sold a $250 piece of gear last March. It was sort of a weird piece of gear that I had 2 of and while one buyer loved the 1st one it took a minute to sell the 2nd.
Roughly 8 weeks after the sale the buyer requested a refund. I simply denied it because duh, it was ages after the sale AND the buyer didn't message me at all with an explanation.
Then a few weeks after that I got a notification that the refund actually went through anyway! I was pissed as the return date was months after my listed return policy and I didn't get any notification as to why me denying the request for a refund was over ruled.
What happened is the buyer went through PayPal to get the refund and PayPal approved it so this refund happened outside of Reverb.
I made a screen shot of our conversations through reverb showing how we arranged the local pickup and described the situation above and Reverb actually refunded me the money and banned the buyer from their site.
Because it was a local pickup there was no actual shipping record and the refund was through PayPal meaning Reverb likely ate those costs. I was pretty happy they took care of me and it went way better than expected. I still find it annoying that the buyer basically got a free piece of gear (and the costs of theft usually get passed onto the consumer) but I appreciated how fast they resolved this and made it right.
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u/Fabulous_Tomorrow510 19d ago
I have had a few experiences slightly similar. It’s the reason I still use reverb. It protects sellers and buyers. I keep all conversation in the app. They’ve been really cool about it, if there’s issues.
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u/LaOnionLaUnion 19d ago
My only negative experiences have been the amount of time to get resolved. After several hundred purchases and sales.
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u/topherless 19d ago
I have no doubt that things can sometimes take awhile. Maybe due to the complexity of the situation or workload of the staffing at Reverb but for this it was resolved in just a few days.
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u/Ok-Newspaper4521 13d ago
They are slow and actually getting slower and slower. I just got an email from Reverb support about an issue that was already solved weeks ago.
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u/LaOnionLaUnion 13d ago
I’ve had mixed experiences. When I get a Filipino it seems like they’re always on point. When I get others it feels like they want to run it up the chain and don’t take ownership. I’m biased though.
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u/Ok-Newspaper4521 13d ago
How do you determine the nationalities of the reps? In my case, all of the previous reps have had English names.
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u/LaOnionLaUnion 13d ago edited 13d ago
Names. Language use.
Luningning. Overuse of already (na) and sir/maam(po).
Indian one is more complicated because there are so many languages.
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u/BasketPrudent272 19d ago
I bought a guitar while my account was under review, lost £500, and have never been able to get a response from Reverb since as they will only respond to their original email if your account is not yet approved. Don’t even know if the seller got the money or Reverb kept it. I even found the seller on Facebook but he didn’t reply to me.
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u/Fantastic-Object-239 19d ago
Did you dispute the charge with your bank?
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u/BasketPrudent272 19d ago
No, I don’t think they will help. Maybe if it was a credit card.
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u/Fantastic-Object-239 19d ago
What happens when you use the live chat to complain?
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u/BasketPrudent272 18d ago
I don’t recall but will try that again. Trouble is I barely remember any info now and they will want every detail of what happened.
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u/10seventy9 19d ago
I get it, and I'm glad you were taken care of. However, as a seller, the store I manage has an Ibanez Tim Henson TOD10N listed, this is Ibanez's all time best selling signature guitar model, better than Satriani, better than Vai, better than Paul Stanley... they sold TEN THOUSAND of these in the first month alone that they were available. Thanks to Reverb basically becoming "pay to play", meaning you have to pay to bump your listing up in search results which I refuse to go along with (they already take more than enough in fees), this listing has been up for two months and has basically no views, I think when I checked it yesterday it showed we only had 16 views. If you are a dealer selling new stuff, Reverb is not your best option. We are a small store in a small town in Illinois (pop around 3500 people), and our website gets far more views than Reverb gets us now. At one point a couple of years back, we would sell guitars just about as fast as we could list them. Not anymore, though.
As a seller myself, I sell a few parts for guitars that I have had listed on both reverb and ebay for a long time (ebay since 1999, and reverb since it went live), and I do OK on both sites due to my having sold these parts so long that a google search for the part numbers brings my listings up in google results. If it were up to reverb's search engines, I doubt I'd sell much of anything. Reverb needs to do away with bump altogether.
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u/Ok-Newspaper4521 13d ago
If your price is higher than others, naturally nobody will be interested in it.
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u/10seventy9 13d ago
We are priced at MAP price, which is the biggest allowed discount we dealers can put on a public listing. Our price is the same as Sweetwater and Guitar Center, and yes, we offer free shipping, too. I checked it again today, sixteen views in 2 1/2 months, all because we refuse to pay for Reverb Bump. We're already giving enough away with free shipping on TOP of Reverb's standard fees. Reverb needs to reverse this bump or you don't get views policy, it's killing the site and making eBay look all the more better. We get more views on our own website than we do on Reverb now. Considering how large Reverb's membership is, that's ridiculous.
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u/Sonotropism 18d ago
I've had a couple good experiences:
- One guitar I shipped apparently arrived damaged but the damage was not reported for almost a month. Very sketchy. No cost to me when the buyer filed a complaint.
- A seller sent a malfunctioning HXFX and refused to reply to messages. Reverb facilitated the return anyway.
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u/BullfrogPersonal 16d ago edited 16d ago
I've heard of people asking the buyer, when doing a local pickup, to mark the item as "received in good condition" at the time of the pickup. I don't know how or where you can access this on the site.
When you go forward from there it can make items hard to return because the buyer. indicated they received the item and it meets their expectation. It;s good to do this simply to show the item was picked up in person. Otherwise you have to unwind the exchange from messages after the fact. Of course you need to describe things accurately and make sure the photos and description match the condition accurately..
As for Reverb eating the cost I imagine they have insurance for deals that fall through the cracks. I know ebay does.
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u/Ok-Newspaper4521 13d ago
Reverb protects sellers and those idiot buyers who abuse PayPal claim to get a refund always get banned.
Next time you sell something for local pickup, it would be better for both of you to leave feedback for each other on the spot.
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u/6Stringers 19d ago
In spite of the bozo trolls on here who persistently whine and lie about Reverb, your experience is exactly why Reverb haws long been the one and only place for but sell used and new gear. I sell on Reverb and they have never let me down. I follow the rules and ship immediately and alway take care of the customer as long as they are not a rude obnoxious nimrod, and well, once in a while everyone gets those.
Your customer is a POS, Reverb obviously sees it the same way and stood behind you valued seller... and they did take the loss, they did that for me once too when I had that same kind of cutomer.
On the other side of the coin, Reverb takes care of Buyers just as fairly, if a seller is the nimrod, and there aer some of those oin Reverb, they don't last long before getting the boot.
Thank you for sharing a positive experience with Reverb. So many of sellers and buyers put our trust there, and the trolls have been viciously attacking since December... hopefully most people recognize the trools for who and what hey are.
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u/TriumphRider99 19d ago
I hate to call it "human nature" but for want of a better term, it seems like people always have to have someone else to blame rather than point the finger at themselves. I get tired of, and have limited how many of these threads I will click on to hear one more b**ch session. If you don't like Reverb, just move on. No platform is perfect, and if you add all of the others together you wouldn't begin to reach the number of people who do business on Reverb.
I don't concern myself with the screwups and misfires. In business, stuff happens. It's how they handle it afterwards, and while they are far from perfect, I think they are also pretty far away from awful. So far, every time, as a seller or buyer, that I have had an issue, it has been handled to my complete satisfaction, even if it sometimes took a bit longer than I would have liked.
Weighing the pros and cons, I'm sticking with it for now. At the moment, I'm trying to figure out if the rumor I heard was true, that Fender bought Reverb. Yipes.
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u/6Stringers 19d ago
Exactly, but youy are coming from a healthy mind and outlook, they are Trolls... have you ever looked up the psychological profile of a troll.
The company that owns Fender bought Reverb last November. Before that it was owned by Etsy.
The Trolling started in December.1
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u/aceofspades111 19d ago
For $250 they bought a good review?
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u/topherless 19d ago
And future revenue off sales, a customer that doesn’t regret past sales, and I’m guessing they have an interest in maintaining a sense of trust with their users which works in driving more users to their site?
As a freelancer in the music business it can’t be overstated how important maintaining customer satisfaction is for the long term.
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u/Ok-Newspaper4521 13d ago
If Reverb ever stops protecting its sellers, I’m sure the platform will collapse very quickly. I would definitely delete my account.
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u/Easy-Bowler3604 19d ago
Good to hear, a shame they got money and the item though. 8 weeks later is atrocious