PLEASE HELP - Ebay item NOT received! Update #12

[wasabi girl]

This is a good illustration as to why BUYERS need to understand listing policies as well as sellers.

eBay has clear rules for pre-sale auctions. The listing must state the item is a pre-sale and it must be shipped within 30 days of the auction end:

http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/pre-sale.html

I would recommend never bidding on pre-sale auctions, but if you do, keep careful track of time and file a claim with PayPal (if this is how you paid) or ebay (if you paid via another method) at the 30 day mark.

I would be filing as many fraud charges against this seller as possible, and would consider small claims court action.

And FYI - eBay is a venue, which means they do very little "policing" of their auctions. You must look out for yourself.

Neither DD nor myself knew that ebay had time constraints on pre-sale auctions. No matter however, they did not enforce anything. The auction was in February (middle) and the item was not due to be shipped until the end of April.
We've always had good experience with ebay sellers until this year but since this spring we've (all 4 members of the household are ebay users) had 3 bad experiences. Kind of sad.