You actually had someone mail back an empty box? Yeah, never seen that. I am not a power seller, been on eBay for about 12 years less than 200 trans. Although I do use paypal only and have excellent feedback so I don't foresee eBay not sticking up for me if the buyer is a newbee and tries to pull what you stated above.... A person who is on eBay and has a good track record does not want to be kick out, so I can't fathom the scenario you described. The fees still out-weigh the hassles of craigslist and the loss of trade-in. Just my opinion...
I've also had someone claim my item was fake, file a claim with ebay, get my paypal frozen, they shipped the item back and the item they sent back was a fake and not the original item i had sent. Their money refunded and i'm stuck with a pos item that is fake. Since they claimed my item was fake...ebay cancelled all my remaining items i had for sale and would not give me a refund back on my listing fees and suspended my selling account for 3 months. I sat on thousands of dollars worth of inventory I could not sell. All bc one ebay buyer decided to lie. eBay's response=we had no reason to believe the buyer would not be telling the truth.
buyer's can also do chargeback on credit cards....so you could be a month or 2 down the line thinking all is ok and it's not.
You also get people who don't read the entire auction and expect all these extra things once the item shows up. Where is this? where is that?
Just bc you haven't had any issues...doesn't mean issues don't occur. You just haven't had very much activity on eBay like some of us.
I learned a good lesson from using eBay. The extra $30 or so for selling on there was totally not worth the hassle or the risk. For me, my time and less hassle is worth a lot more than the $30 extra I would have had in my pocket from eBay.
Again, eBay doesn't let you leave negative feedback to a buyer. Why do you think that is?