CHARLOTTE — Craig Sheltra’s son likes to draw. So he went on the Walmart app and bought his son an iPad for $729, not from the store directly, but a third-party seller.
“My son is getting into drawing and wanted a tablet to draw on so he thought an iPad would be the route that he wanted to go,” he said. “He took it upstairs, used it for a couple of days, came back down, said it’s not really working.”
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So Sheltra decided to try a different brand. “I immediately went, returned it to Walmart on their online store [and] went ahead and purchased the other device,” he said. “At this point, I’ve got 1,500 bucks out there because I’ve already bought my son’s other device.”
He says he was thinking, “OK, yeah everything‘s great. I’ll have the money back in 10 days. This will be over and done with.”
But he says it didn’t work out that way. He says he spent weeks going back and forth with Walmart, but nothing changed.
“No resort but to reach out to somebody like yourself,” he told Action 9 attorney Jason Stoogenke.
Stoogenke emailed the company. Sheltra emailed him about six hours later: Walmart had contacted him and was going to refund the money. The company told Action 9 the same thing about an hour after that. It’s not clear what the actual issue was. The business only said,“I’m happy to report that our customer service team has been in touch with Craig and resolved the refund issue. He was also given a gift card for the inconvenience.”
There are a lot of situations when we, as consumers, go to one company’s site and buy something from another seller. If there’s more than one party involved, do what Sheltra did:
- Be persistent with the company you had contact with.
- That’s the one who you have a deeper relationship with.
- Let them deal with the third-party vendor.
You can see more information about Walmart’s marketplace, specifically, at this link.