There are bad apples on both side.

My girlfriend used to own a factory but she has scaled wayyy back and mostly does on-line sale through etsy. Insulated lunch bags, fabric case for cell phones, iPAD... She gets bad checks at craft and quilt shows. Small but still stings. And on-line customer who are literally impossible. She does custom embroidery. A whole box full of impossible requests. Think of crazy request and its in there. Even misspelled the name on the order and my girlfriend get the blame. To one that went to a big name company but it was meant for someone at the company. Well he didn't put his name on it or mail stop. He never got it. My girlfriend sent a copy of his order showing he didn't put his name on it. Not even on his pay-pal account. So she was willing to compromise at her loss to send him a replacement at half the selling cost. No personal name to a big name company is not all that unusual for her.

Then as a buyer side of things. Some small time sellers do not pack their items well enough. Or description has lots of imagination...

I prefer to buy direct from the seller instead of going through Amazon market place.

Enjoy it while you can. Latest proposal in congress is to have internet sales tax based on where the buyer is located. That means as a seller, you will have to file tax statements quarterly or monthly for each of nearly 10,000 tax districts in US. My girlfriend is already thinking what her game plan is going to be when that happens. I'm sure there will be whole new business opportunity for accountants to handle all the internet tax. And there will be small business who pays the "tax clearing house" and be scammed. What ever happened to interstate commerce laws where it prohibited states from collecting tax on interstate sales or was it something slightly different?