At All Costs

That's the title, "At All Costs." Very apt.

The buyer of this book wrote to me, saying "The item was not in the promised condition. Comment/ Question: Honest mistake I am sure. Item has tears and moderate erosion in dustjacket (not slight), the CDROM is missing and the binding is loose. I've sold on eBay for a couple of years now and would list this item in "acceptable" condition. I'm not upset, I will gladly accept a replacement item and shipping refund."

I think she means that I should send her money to return the book to me; or that I should send her another copy of the book, presumably in better shape, and refund her cost of shipping, so she could return the book.

Well, I guess I'm just out the full refund, including shipping, that I sent to her. I don't have another copy.

She's right, there was no CD-ROM in the copy I had. Honest people can and do disagree about the condition rating of a book; but if I realized a book contained a CD-ROM when new and didn't when it came into my possession, I'd make note of that in the description. Usually a book with a CD-ROM will have a sleeve or envelope glued inside the back. This one didn't. The descriptions of other sellers of this same book did not mention a CD either, at least, not that I noticed.

I first thought she didn't know what she was talking about.

In fact, it took quite some digging for me to find out that it did originally ship with a CD. Perhaps it was mentioned on the dust jacket and I overlooked it. Perhaps not. The Wikipedia article I found explains it.

The neat thing about the internet is that we can use it to build trust in each other.

With the full refund and the book, I would argue that my customer came out ahead. True, she did suffer the inconvenience of not getting what she paid for; but she got all her money back and she gets to keep the book. With the refund, she can try again to get the book and CD.

And I learned a couple of things. The most important being the value of trusting the customer.