Agreed with Gorn. It's become increasingly expected in the age of online retail that everyone selling something online should behave like Amazon or Wal-Mart. If you as the buyer don't like what you get, for any reason, the seller should make it right, up to and including taking the product back and paying a refund.
Well, that expectation is valid when you're dealing with Amazon or Wal-Mart, with tens of millions a day in sales, returns are part of the cost of doing business, and most of the people you actually see working for the store are paid by the hour and have little or no personal investment in the store or its products. In fact, in many cases Amazon doesn't even want "returned" items back, they'll just refund you the money, because the item's value or markup is less than the cost of an RMA to retrieve it.
That expectation is highly invalid when you are dealing with someone selling a few things he or she has personally owned and used, and still values, but is willing to part with for the right price. This is no Wal-Mart customer service associate; what you're buying was purchased with hours out of his or her life. That's literal skin in the game, a personal investment in the item being sold. So imagine the hilarity that ensues when someone conditioned by the big-box retail experience, or in the extreme has learned how to exploit that environment to their advantage (the stereotypical "Karen"), brings those expectations to this more personal selling environment.
Unfortunately, online marketplace sites often adopt the policies of their real-world retail cousins, at least by default; disputes over sold items disproportionately favor the buyer. So, when direct "negotiations" over the condition of a received item start with the Karen asserting their typical social superiority over a retailer, and end predictably with the seller telling the Karen to pound sand, they got what they paid for, the Karen takes her argument to the "manager" - the actual site's customer service department - and to the seller's horror, the site's payment processor reverses the transaction pretty much as a matter of course, because the seller had the site's default return/refund policies in place on the listing.
If you've ever experienced that, if you even continue to use that online market at all, you use every tool you're given to protect yourself, up to and including listing everything "as-is". As-Is status, on most sites, typically overrides buyer protections that the seller is otherwise required to agree to as a condition of listing the item, and has become very popular as a direct response to the abuse of these buyer protections by unscrupulous or just overly-entitled buyers. As-is means no returns, refunds, exchanges, warranties or credits will be extended by the seller nor enforced by the site.
There is one very important exception to the buyer protection overrides, namely that the item must still be "as described". An error or omission that creates a clear disconnect between the item's stated condition and its actual condition is still the seller's responsibility. The marketplace company can do no other, because to refuse to assist the buyer in these situations is to condone fraud, and civil practice lawyers love it when they get a clear shot at deep pockets in fraud cases.
So, "as-is" does not mean "this is junk, walk away". It means "I am telling you up front that if you buy this item, once the money changes hands and the item is delivered, our business is concluded". The site carrying the listing will still hold the seller to an accurate description and depiction of the item being sold.
