Horrendous Experience With Paypal

Bought some stamps from eBay recently and later requested from a refund from the seller as there were issues with the stamps. He agreed to pay me back part of the money. The refund was shown to be pending on my account for days and when I messaged paypal umpteen times at their Help Center, there was no response whatsoever. I tried calling the land line in the local office in Singapore but you only get to talk to a machine which doesn't help. I had no choice but to raise a dispute on paypal to get my refund but even then, the amount was still on hold after a few days. As a last resort, I had to go down to their office in town to settle the matter. When I went there, I was simply made to fill up a form just for them to contact the customer service in the US. I was thinking aren't those guys in the office already the customer service? Only after filling in the form and submitting to the person at the Singapore office did I get a person responding me in the online Help Centre a few days later. When the amount was finally shown in my paypal balance, I made a withdrawal to my bank account which took 3 days.

The efficiency of the customer service at Paypal is indeed terrible and they gave me the impression that they were disinterested to answer to queries and would rather push people to post questions in their community forum. I have also read similar feedback about paypal's customer service; think it is high time they improved or be replaced one day.

PayPal is notoriously slow. They like to hold onto our money and get interest.

It could also be a result of "Managed Payments" at eBay. Or possibly b/c Paypal now requires the funds for the refund to be in the account at the time, they no longer pull it from your bank account. So if someone doesn't keep funds in their account they have to transfer it in which can take days to do. Add International into the mix...Their customer service is tiered, older accounts or business accounts that are longstanding get classed as "Money Now" I think is what they call it, get excellent customer service. I never wait more than a couple minutes on the phone and they are usually very helpful. It sucks but that's how they are allocating their people.

Refunds from PayPal are also affected by how you paid. If you paid from the PayPal balance it should only take one day. If the payment came from your bank account it could take 3-5 days. If you paid with a credit card it can take up to 30 days depending on your credit card's policy. Of course this is only in theory and other factors can be in play.

"They like to hold onto our money and get interest"

Pointless these days with interest rates near zero.

Hello.
There is no bizum in the USA?
Regards.

I remember waiting for a refund and because I'd paid using my CC the refund had gone back directly to my CC and I didn't realize it.

@Roberto59, as I understand it, bizum is currently only in Spain, and is looking at expanding to the EU next, but not North America/elsewhere.

And for what's it worth, always had good experiences with Paypal both as buyer & seller.

~Greg

The strange thing with paypal is that they do not question the method of refund. The seller refunded me the money in the form of a purchase for items which I did not sell him, causing me to incur the seller's fee. I told paypal that I had sold him nothing but they didn't seem to care, probably because they had the seller's fee to earn. The seller said he was going to refund me the seller's fee but just went silent after that. Again I messaged paypal pertaining to this issue days ago and they just told me to contact the seller and went silent thereafter.