Item Not as Described on eBay, Amazon, and Etsy: Who Pays

My listing said light surface pitting on the sole, cleaned and waxed, iron sharpened and ready to use. The return reason said Doesn't match description or photos. Two sentences about the same block plane, and only one of them is going to be treated as evidence.

That is the shape of a not-as-described case. It feels unwinnable not because marketplaces dislike sellers, but because the written decision rules on all three platforms decline to ask the question you want asked: whether the buyer is right about the object. They ask questions answerable from records instead, and nearly every one of those records is something you either created before the sale or failed to create.

Policy as of 2026-09-08. Every page named below was read that day. The Amazon and Etsy rules quoted here moved in 2026, so re-read those two in 90 days; the eBay sections are on a 180-day cycle.

eBay's decision list has four items, and "did it match" is not one of them

Under "Deciding the outcome when the item doesn't match the listing," the eBay Money Back Guarantee policy (read 2026-09-08) says eBay will look for all of the following:

1. Evidence that the buyer and seller have each met their return requirements
2. Whether the seller breached eBay policies when listing the item
3. Whether the item can be shipped back to the seller
4. Proof of return delivery, if the item was being returned

Read that list twice. Three of the four are process facts: did each side do what the policy told them to do, is the item shippable, did the return actually arrive. Only the second is substantive, and notice which direction it points. It asks whether you broke a listing rule. There is no line that reads "whether the item was in fact as described," because that is a question about an object nobody at eBay has handled.

The consequences are asymmetric, and also written down. If eBay determines the seller did not meet their return requirements, the buyer receives a refund for the full cost of the item and original shipping, the seller must reimburse eBay for that refund, and the buyer may not be required to return the item at all. If the buyer did not meet their return requirements, the softer language appears: the buyer "may not receive a full refund for the item and/or shipping costs."

The case turns on compliance, and compliance is a checklist. Bad news if you were planning to argue. Good news if you would rather work a list.

The category is far wider than misdescription

Part of why sellers meet this case so often is that "doesn't match the listing" is a bucket, not an accusation. The same policy puts several things in it that most of us would file elsewhere:

• The wrong item was sent. The only clause that matches the everyday meaning of the phrase.
• The item arrives broken, damaged, or faulty and was not clearly described as such. Transit damage lands here. eBay tells buyers directly that if a package arrives empty or was damaged in transit, they should accept the delivery and report that the item doesn't match the listing.
• The item arrived after the latest estimated delivery date. Covered, and in eBay's own words, "The return is treated as if the item didn't match the listing." A late parcel becomes a not-as-described return with seller-paid return shipping attached to it.
• A part covered by eBay Guaranteed Fit doesn't fit the buyer's vehicle, where the buyer selects "Doesn't fit my vehicle" as the return reason.

Three of those four have nothing to do with how you wrote the description. If you sell parts, glass, or anything fragile, a chunk of your not-as-described rate is a shipping statistic wearing a different name. That matters when you are working out which of the four routes a buyer can take to get their money back you are standing in, because the remedies differ.

The timings, from the same policy. The outer window for the buyer is 30 calendar days or your own stated returns window, whichever is longer, which is set out with the other three routes here. The clocks that belong to you start after that. The seller is required to respond and provide a solution within 3 business days of the request, and eBay adds that "in some cases, eBay may automatically accept the return on the seller's behalf." Once return tracking shows the item delivered back to you, eBay may issue the refund on your behalf without asking. Either party can ask eBay to step in from the third business day, up to 21 business days after the request date if the seller never responded.

Amazon opens the claim on your silence, not on the item

Amazon's route is A-to-z, and the buyer-facing eligibility conditions are public. From Check your Eligibility to Request an A-to-z Guarantee Refund (read 2026-09-08): the order must come from a third-party seller with a last possible delivery date 90 days or less ago, and one of six specific conditions has to apply. The second is ours:

The item you received is damaged, defective, or not as described. AND you have requested a return more than 48 hours ago and the seller hasn't authorized your return request.

There is no evidence requirement in that sentence. No photographs, no third-party opinion, nothing establishing that the item is in fact different from the listing. The trigger is 48 hours of an unauthorized return request. Condition 4 repeats the pattern: the buyer is eligible if the return request was closed or not authorized, or if the prepaid return label carried an invalid tracking ID. Condition 5 covers the tail, seven days after the return reaches you with no refund issued.

Which means the most common way a small seller acquires an A-to-z claim out of a not-as-described complaint is by taking a weekend off.

The money sits in a table on the same page, worth having in front of you when you decide whether to authorize:

"Materially different" is Amazon's phrase for not matching the listing, and its row is the expensive one: you pay the item, the shipping out, and the shipping back. Every other reason code, fashion aside, leaves the return leg with the buyer and permits a restocking deduction.

Amazon's own A-to-z Guarantee Program Policy (read 2026-09-08) is short and mostly about your obligations. A granted claim "may result in an impact to your account health and/or a refund being issued to the customer at your cost." And the obligation that produces most of them is one line long: you are "required to promptly respond to Buyer-Seller messages and return requests." The account-health limb of that first sentence is the part sellers underprice, because a granted claim is an order defect, and the defect rate has a 1 percent ceiling that a slow month can breach on arithmetic alone.

A buyer who takes the complaint to their card instead loses the A-to-z route, and eBay closes a Money Back Guarantee case the same way. That mutual exclusivity is the whole subject of the four routes piece and is not repeated here; what matters for a not-as-described complaint is that the cheapest of those routes for you is the one that never opens.

Where a granted claim or a forced refund leaves you out of pocket, reimbursement runs through a SAFE-T claim, and both of its clocks were shortened this year: a four-day decision window and a thirty-day filing window that most of the older guidance still has wrong.

On Etsy, the same finding decides whether Etsy pays or you do

Etsy is the only one of the three where the not-as-described determination has a direct cash consequence for the platform itself, which makes its rules unusually legible.

There are three case types, listed in How to Open a Case (read 2026-09-08): non-delivery, not as described, and item arrived damaged. Etsy defines the middle one by example. The colour, design or model is different from what was displayed in the listing description and photos. The buyer received the incorrect quantity. The condition of the item is misrepresented.

Timing has the same 48-hour shape as Amazon, with a hard outer wall. A buyer can open a case once the estimated delivery date has passed and 48 hours have gone by since they sent a Help with order request. Etsy adds that the callout in the buyer's account "also shows how long you'll have to open a case before that order is no longer eligible, which will be 30 days from your order's estimated delivery date."

On money, Etsy is blunt: "If Etsy determines that the item you received doesn't match the item that was listed, the seller must refund: the cost of the item; the original shipping cost; and the return shipping cost. In some cases, Etsy may issue the refund on the seller's behalf."

Now the part that makes Etsy different from the other two. What is Etsy's Purchase Protection for Sellers? (read 2026-09-08) lists the situations where Etsy covers up to $250 of a refund and the seller keeps their earnings. One of them is this:

Their item matches the listing description and photos, but a buyer claims it does not

The ineligible list a few paragraphs down carries its mirror image: "The item doesn't match the listing description. We strongly recommend using accurate photos and descriptions when listing an item."

On Etsy the finding decides not just who refunds but whether Etsy's money or yours leaves the building. The criteria that put you in the protected column are all pre-sale or same-week habits: the order shipped within your stated processing time, valid tracking was provided or the label was bought through Etsy, the listing carries an estimated delivery date with transit times, the item matches the photos and description, you responded to the buyer's Help with order message within 48 hours, and, for damage, it is the first instance in the calendar year.

Two dates worth writing down. Etsy says that for cases opened before 7 May 2026 you should refer to the Purchase Protection policy in effect at that time, which is a polite way of saying the rules moved under everyone this spring. On appeals, Etsy will re-review a closed case about an item that arrived damaged or different than described, with a final decision by email within 1 to 3 business days, while cases about items never received or arriving late cannot be reviewed further, "since we already have all the info we need." The disputed-condition cases are the ones with a second door.

The return leg, reason by reason

Side by side, the three rulebooks agree more than they differ; the disagreements sit in the fine print.

Two eBay clauses in that first cell repay attention. When the seller is responsible for return shipping, the seller "must provide a return shipping label or another return method that is acceptable to the buyer," and eBay "may provide the buyer with a return shipping label on the seller's behalf and will charge the seller for the cost of the label." You do not get to decline the leg by declining to buy a label. You get to decline choosing the carrier.

There is also a trap for anyone who likes to settle things informally: "If the seller sends funds to the buyer to pay for return shipping, the seller will not be refunded the amount by eBay even if the buyer chooses to not return the item." Sending twelve dollars through the message thread as a goodwill gesture is a donation, not a return label.

Both eBay and Amazon condition the outcome on the return arriving. eBay's proof-of-return-delivery standard mirrors its outbound one: a delivered or attempted-delivery status, the date, the recipient's address showing at least the city/county or zip code matching the seller's specified return address, and signature confirmation on items totalling $750 or more. Then the sting: "If the party responsible for return shipping does not use a tracked service that meets these requirements, a case may be decided against them if the returned item doesn't arrive." On a not-as-described return, the responsible party is you. Buy the label with tracking that validates, and above $750 buy the signature, or you have handed the buyer both the item and the refund on a technicality of your own making.

Three things in a listing a case handler can actually verify

The useful work happens long before anyone opens a case. Three parts of a listing are checkable by somebody who has never touched the item, and those three are what move outcomes.

The condition grade, in the condition field. Not in the prose. A structured value can be compared against a photograph in about four seconds; a sentence in the third paragraph of a description cannot be compared against anything, and that is exactly where I used to bury the flaw. For two years I wrote "some pitting" into the fifth line of a description and called it a disclosure. It was a hiding place. The condition line now goes first, in the condition field, with the defect named ahead of the virtues.

A photograph of the specific defect, inside the listing. Photographs sent later in the message thread arrive after the buyer has already formed the complaint, and they read as a defence rather than as a disclosure. The one in the listing is dated by the listing. eBay's buyer return requirements also say any images added to a return request must be relevant to the return reason and comply with its Images, video and text policy, so the picture war is regulated from both ends.

Numbers. Measurements, weight, model and serial numbers, and the count of what is in the box. Quantity disputes sit on Etsy's own list of what not-as-described means, and a quantity is the easiest fact in the world to settle if it was recorded before shipping. That is where the outbound record earns its keep: the ten minutes of photographing and logging every order before it leaves is this same evidence, seen from the other end.

None of this stops a determined false claim. It decides which side of eBay's second criterion you stand on when the case is graded, and which column of Etsy's Purchase Protection table your order falls into.

Deducting from the refund, and the exact moment that option disappears

Suppose the item comes back worse than it left. eBay's seller protections page (read 2026-09-08) lets you deduct up to 50 percent from the refund to recover the lost value of the item, if you are not Below Standard and the listing offered free returns. The two-business-day reporting window that governs how you claim it, and the separate Top Rated protection that subsidises a return label up to $6.00, are worked through step by step in the empty-box piece. What belongs here is the one sentence that decides whether the option exists at all:

If eBay steps in to help with the return at any stage, you'll no longer be able to deduct an amount from the buyer's refund.

Escalation and deduction are mutually exclusive. If you are angry enough to want eBay to look at the case, you are trading the 50 percent for the opinion. And on a not-as-described return that trade can be made for you by silence, because the Money Back Guarantee policy quoted earlier lets eBay step in without the buyer asking when the seller did not respond to the return request.

Deduct carefully once you do have the option. The same page makes the sizing of a deduction an offence in its own right, separately from reporting a buyer you had no business reporting: "Unfairly deducting too much from the buyer's refund when an item is returned in a different condition. In these cases, the deduction should only be used to recoup the actual lost value of the item."

Read that as a definition rather than a warning. The deduction is a valuation, not a penalty, and eBay treats an inflated one as evidence about you rather than about the buyer. Which is worth holding next to the sums involved: six dollars of label subsidy is what winning a false-claim argument outright pays a Top Rated Seller. The real money in these cases was never in the refund. It is in the metric, and eBay publishes the line below which even that stops mattering — no service metrics consequences while your rate is under 1 percent in a specific category, or while you have had fewer than 10 not-as-described or not-received requests from unique buyers. Under that floor, the argument costs more than the loss does.

When the box comes back with something else inside it

A not-as-described return sometimes becomes a different problem on arrival, and the rules above stop applying the moment it does.

eBay's buyer return requirements say the buyer "must return the item in the same condition in which it was received," and its abusive buyer policy lists "Returning an item other than the original item received" and "Falsely claiming an item was not as described" among the behaviours that cost a buyer their Money Back Guarantee coverage. But invoking them is a different procedure on a different clock, and the first hour after you open the parcel decides most of it: the weighing, the unedited video, the report, and the order in which you tell the platform and the carrier. That sequence is set out separately for empty-box and switched-item returns, because doing it out of order forfeits it.

The handover point matters. Once you allege that what came back is not what you sent, you have left the not-as-described case and entered a buyer-abuse report. Do not run both inside the return request.

The dates worth putting on a calendar before you reply

The clocks are most of the game, and none appears as a countdown in the seller interface.

• eBay, 3 business days from the return request to respond with a solution, or eBay may accept the return for you. Then 2 business days after the returned item reaches you to issue the refund — that is the deadline for every not-as-described return, not only the ones you intend to deduct from, and the return details screen shows the exact date where eBay has allowed more.
• Amazon, 48 hours from the buyer's return request to authorize it, before the A-to-z door opens. Then 7 days from the return being delivered to you, after which a missing refund becomes its own claim ground.
• Etsy, 48 hours to answer the Help with order message, which doubles as a Purchase Protection eligibility criterion, and 30 days from the estimated delivery date as the outer edge of the buyer's case window.
• Etsy again, 1 to 3 business days for a re-review decision if a damaged or different-than-described case closed against you.

Today's job is smaller than any of that. Open your three most recent listings and check whether the condition grade sits in the condition field, whether one photograph shows the worst part of the item rather than the best, and whether a measurement or a model number appears somewhere a stranger could find it. Those three edits take about ten minutes, and they are the part of the case you can no longer change once one is open.

Every figure above is quoted from a page linked where it appears, all read 2026-09-08. Amazon's and Etsy's rules moved this year, so re-read A-to-z eligibility and Etsy Purchase Protection for Sellers before you lean on a number.