Quote:
Originally Posted by jgmp123
I am very leary about this site and the guy that owns it..A fella from Canada named Bob Semetka. Let me know if you have had any success working with him.
A couple red flags that I have seen...
- I sent an email asking if an item was available and made offer $20 less than he had listed...He then responded to me and went crazy on me for asking for the reduction. I thought I was the customer.
Also, probably the biggest red flag is the payment types accepted:
Straight from his website....
U.S. Order Payment Options - A U.S. Bank Money Order (subject to clearance) or "International" U.S. Post Office Money Order (orange pink color) or Western Union MO, Items will be shipped next business day.
Note - For various reasons I am not accepting any form of U.S. Bank Checks incl. personal or certified, draft etc.
Canadian Order Payment Options - A Canadian Bank Check (subject to clearance) or Bank or Post Office Money Order.
Cash is at purchasers discretion.
Credit Card or PayPal payments are not available - If interested to know why, type PayPal Complaints into your browser.
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I actually had a transaction in progress with Bob (my first) when you posted this, so held off on commenting until I had received the items. The end result was that everything came out okay. Being stateside, I had to jump through a few hoops to get payment to him, but everything arrived as promised.
My take on the situation is that Bob has probably been burned by Paypal in some way in the past, and rather than risk repeating that situation, chooses not to accept Paypal payments. Paypal does have its risks (primarily for the seller), but by enabling Joe Average to accept credit card payments without having to have a merchant account, it does simplify things a lot. In this case though, Bob had something that I wanted (stumbled across it with a simple Google search), so I decided to go ahead and jump through the hoops.
First, I found what I wanted on his website and sent him an e-mail to make sure it was still available and see how best to get the payment to him. I got a short reply back that he needed to know if I was in the U.S. or Canada (fair enough), and to look at the ordering instructions on the website (which gave shipping rates for individual cards, not card lots like the one I was inquiring about). So after I tell him where he's shipping to, he tells me that the prices listed on his site are if you're paying in Canadian $, and if I'm sending U.S. $ to add 8% to cover the bank conversion fees. He also asked that I advise whether I wanted to reserve the lot pending my payment.
A little less than 24 hours later I get a curt e-mail saying that if I don't want the cards, just let him know. That it doesn't take long to send an e-mail and he went to the trouble of weighing them and giving me a shipping quote, and that I needed to wake up. I'm assuming that Bob has also gotten a lot of inquirers that never followed through with the transaction, and is a bit short-tempered as a result. I politely ignored the tirade, e-mailed him back that I would be sending payment as he instructed (USPS international money order), and to please reserve the lot for me. When I did finally get to the bank and purchased the international money order, I noticed that it still gave the amount as "US $", so not being sure if this counted as sending Canadian or US funds to Bob, I threw in a few extra bucks cash to cover the 8% surcharge he had quoted.
I'm not sure if that was what was expected, but it seemed to work as I got an e-mail from Bob a couple weeks later that he was sending the cards out, and received them safe and sound and as promised a couple weeks after that.
So, all of that is to say that, while not exactly what I would call a smoothe transaction, Bob did everything he said he would do, even if I did have to do some extra legwork to get the payment to him. The whole thing really resembled ordering something from a print ad in the back of a magazine more than your typical over-the-internet transaction. I would also add that my purchase did not include any autographed items, so I can't speak with any personal experience regarding those.
To sum up my overall experience, I would say Bob may be a bit of a curmudgeon who could stand to brush up on his people skills, but he delivered everything as promised, and I never got the impression that he was up to no good.