Caught up in the bidding frenzy, my friend bid several thousand for this piano, and won it. We were dispatched to collect it and bring it to my showroom to check it over prior to delivering it to his home.
The minute I saw it I knew he’d hate it – the cabinet was not a nice French polished mahogany as he’d expected, it was a brush-varnished toffee-apple finish that practically obscured all the wood’s grain. The only close-up picture of the finish concentrated on a small area that had been redone in a much lighter tone which he thought was representative of the whole piano.
Further examination revealed that the piano had not had any of the restoration work done claimed in the auction description. The piano was clearly not worth even a third of what he bid and we prepared a report to that effect for him.
He contacted the seller who was adamant that the piano was ‘as described’ and would not refund him, nor take the piano back. So he appealed to the online payment services company associated with the auction website – as that was how he’d paid for the purchase.
At first they denied his claim based on the fact he had collected the piano ‘in person’ and had not used an approved trackable carrier. Since Royal Mail (or any of the company-approved courier companies) don’t remove pianos that argument seemed a bit unfair – what they were saying was that any purchase collected in person, or too heavy for their approved couriers was not covered by the buyer protection that the payment company offered – even though every page on the auction site screamed several times ‘Pay with [payment services company] – you are covered by buyer protection’.
However, a little research on the auction website turned up a page which stated unequivocally that ‘Collection in Person’ was covered by buyer protection. Unfortunately, this did little to sway the payment services company, who still refused to compensate my friend despite the piano being ‘not as described’.
The claim was all done by email – there was no other way to make a claim under this buyer protection scheme – and each time a message was sent the reply was from a different person. After several months with no resolution, my friend then turned to the Financial Services Ombudsman as the payment services company is registered as a financial institution and comes under his purview. Several more months went by as the FSO tried to get a suitable response from them and eventually they grudgingly offered my friend about two-thirds of his money back.
Since, by this time, my friend had other pressing family problems to cope with and wasn't in a position to try and fight them any further he accepted their offer.
This left him with a used piano that had cost him around £1,500 (after the refund) but he had to spend somewhere in the region of £5,000 to get the instrument into the condition the thought it was in when he was bidding.
Now I know this story makes the seller out to be the black sheep, but I don’t think that is the case. The family had bought the piano from a dealer some years previously for a substantial consideration and had been given verbal assurances regarding the condition of the instrument. They repeated these assurances in their auction description as they had no reason to doubt them, the dealer in question having a certain standing in the trade.
It was immediately obvious to my technician when he examined the piano that these claims were spurious, but the seller was adamant that the work had been done because that’s what they were told.
Admittedly, the pictures were a little misleading – they’d been taken several months earlier when the seller lived at a different address and showed the piano in their living room whereas it was, in fact in their garage, a point they failed to mention. And they knew that the finish of the piano was not represented by the close-up picture they supplied.
The payment services company, however, comes out of this in a very poor light. They attempted to avoid their liabilities at every turn even when faced with the clear evidence from their own website (the auction website owns the payment services company) and it was only the intervention of the FSO that got my friend any restitution.
And so the moral of this story is: if you want to bid on a piano in an online auction, be sure of what you are buying.
If possible, look for instruments within visiting distance, and take a technician with you. If you want to view an instrument and the seller is reluctant to allow it – ‘it’s in storage’, ‘it’s at my Mum’s/a friend’s’ or any other excuse – give it a miss.
An auction bid is a legally binding offer to purchase and if you don’t complete the seller can (and probably will) report you to the auction company which could affect your account’s standing, and in theory the seller can pursue you through the courts for their money.
If you are organising a third party to collect the instrument on your behalf you will have to pay for your purchase before you see it and trying to get your money back later can be very stressful as my friend discovered.
Auctions are a bit like buses – there’s always another one.
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