I guess to clarify why I'm asking, as of right now I've never successfully purchased anything from Kijiji (or Craigslist), but I have tried.
My latest attempt was to buy a new Monitor, which has so far been a 10 day "e-mail back and forth".
I'll try to recap my experience:
1 - I ask about the monitor, guy responds, everything seems cool, guy says it has warranty and everything
2 - I ask if he has the receipt, he responds the next day saying it is actually from his company and he doesn't have the receipt but not to worry because it still has warranty
3 - I ask for the serial number so I can confirm its still covered (not sure if people normally do that, but whatever, its a somewhat expensive monitor so I need to be sure).
4 - Guy comes back and says the warranty is non-transferable (I am unsure if that is true, regardless, I am willing to take the risk).
5 - Since there is no warranty I ask for a price reduction (he initially said there was still 2.5 years of warranty), now that it no longer has warranty I would expect a bit of a price drop.
6 - After a couple back and forth emails we settle on a price that was less than his original asking price (we are now 8 days into our "transaction")
7 - We agree to meet on Wednesday, I provide my phone number and he says he will call me after work and we can meet up to exchange money for the monitor (I also want to see it in action to ensure I'm not getting a dud monitor)
8 - Guy emails back and says lets just meet at the train station, I respond asking how that will work seeing as I need to make sure it actually works.
9 - Guy emails back once again and says that it won't be a problem, we can hook the monitor up at the train station and he'll show me that it works (please not that this is a big monitor).
10 - I respond and ask how he is going to show me that it is capable of accepting a signal if we are at a train station. He responds and tells me to bring a laptop and we can test it there (yah, red flags of course are popping up now, I'm going to bring cash and my laptop to a train station? haha).
11 - I respond that I'm not comfortable with that for obvious reasons, he responds back with "I do this for both of our protection" (unsure how this protects me....)
12 - I respond and ask why if he's selling this monitor for his "company" why I can't just pick it up there, he doesn't really respond and in the end he says he can stop by my office and drop it off instead.
13 - So now I wait at our pre-determined meeting spot, no call, no return email, no nothing, I'm pretty sure I've been stood up (and after all this crap I was pretty much expecting this result). Probably for the best that this didn't work out as after all of this I was pretty sure I was going to get stabbed or something trying to save a few bucks on a monitor.
Thats about it so far, pretty sure I'm never getting this monitor (and I'm not too upset), just amazing how much of a gong show these services are and was wondering if others have had the same experiences or if I just have bad luck.
Please share your horrible stories to make me feel better
