Paypal Payment Reversal Policy

This is just a warning to others who sell on ebay and accept Paypal payments. I sold a stamp on ebay yesterday to a buyer in Japan and posted it this morning. Then this afternoon I received a message from Paypal telling me that the buyer had asked for the transaction to be reversed. As a result, I will lose both the stamp and the payment. This is the second time this has happened to me.

I would suggest that if any transactions strike you as odd, you simply should not post the items. In this case there were two warning signs. First, it was odd that a buyer in Japan bought an Australian stamp.This has never happened to me before. Second, the ebay account name was 2g5ytw6k2g5ytw6k0 - which is a bit ridiculous - and the account had only one feedback rating.

The Paypal system is not set up to handle my complaint. All I can do is provide proof of postage (which is impossible, as the item was sent by ordinary mail) or give the buyer a refund. These are the only two options available to me.

I continue to believe that Paypal should be avoided whenever possible and only accepted as a last resort.

Paypal has a support phone number (details on your paypal website). Speak to them and explain what happened. Perhaps they'll reverse their action.

(And a collector's country of residence has no relation to the country a collector buys.)

First question that crossed my mind... was this retribution over some previous dispute? It is easy to establish a new account and use shipping services to hide your identity if you have an issue with someone on ebay. The name and low number of feedbacks would support this theory.
You might not even be aware that there is disgruntled person looking for revenge. I have seen situations were someone did this just because the seller refused to accept an offer to buy before an auction closed.
Don

Fortunately, the proportion of dishonest buyers of stamps seems to be much lower than for other ebay categories, e.g., electronics. This sort of thing has happened to me also, or claims of non-delivery (which to a US address seems incredibly unlikely). This seems analogous to a shoplifter in brick and mortar store or a stamp show. I consider it a cost of doing business in today's world.

The problem is not the crooks ,cheaters and liars out there ,we all know they exist . The problem is good honest ebay SELLERS don't want to do anything about it .
They want ebay or PAYPAL to police the crooks and cheaters for FREE , not going to happen.
We need a computer nerd or someone like the APS to establish a separate website that lists problem transactions with a description of what failed . There is no need for name calling or personel attacks just a failure of transaction .
The cost to a ebay seller would be 5 or $6.00 a month to have access to review all the problems that other members had with that customer. Overtime the list would have hundreds of deadbeat names that each member could decide if they want to do business with that person who other members reported problems with .

There are people out there who, as buyers, try to rip people off. Sorry you seem to have been targeted by one of the,

It sounds to me like the problem is that you don't have any tracking information. Yep, it cost more to ship with tracking. No tracking, no proof you mailed the item, so the buyer can simply claim to have never received the item. In this instance, Paypal will just refund the money.

I use tracking in every item. When I have an unhappy customer,they have to sip the item back before they get a refund. And they have to use tracking, just like I did.

If you have emails from the customer showing that they got the item, you may be able to convince Paypal that they received the item, and make them ship it back. But you will have to talk to a real person to make that happen.

good luck.

Below is about 10% of my blocked buyer/bidder list. If someone wishes to establish a website for an alphabetical list of same, I would certainly contribute. I only recall the reason I blocked march22_2233 but not the reason I blocked the others, and to be useful, a website would probably need a list of reasons as well as a tally of the number of seller who blocked the buyer.

lede-josef, lord_of_lochaber, magvbay, march22_2233, maryj61mary, mattnorden, mbaig007,

Sounds simple enough to do, seeing as how Yelp already does this for restaurants and many other businesses.

Jim

Should still be able to send ebay info to paypal to help you.

Paypal is totally bias to the buyer.

I know this as a seller & buyer.

Just an update: yes, Paypal closed the case in favour of the buyer, who will now receive the stamp in question that he says he did not buy. I've written to him asking him to return the stamp, but, of course, he did not bother to email me back.

The buyer has a feedback rating of 1 and I have over 2700. It seems a good seller rating is not a factor in the Paypal system. The ebay seller is always in the wrong.

BTW I have no known unsatisfactory dealings with any buyer in Japan that might have precipitated an act of retribution.

alub, I can't afford to pay $16 for tracking for a $3 item. It makes no sense to do so. What I am concerned about is not the money, but the insight it provides into how heavily Paypal is biased against sellers. Clearly, they won't spend a $1 of their own in coming up with a settlement that satisfies both parties. (After all, I didn't force this person to buy a stamp from my ebay store!)

At the end of the day I'm glad he didn't buy a more expensive item from me.

What disgusts me is that Paypal makes a great deal about its Buyer Protection programme, but buyers are not aware that it's the seller, not Paypal, that bears the cost.

Sigh, how long are we going to hear about how 'eBay/PayPal is the bad guy'? ebay is not the bad guy nor is it 'bias' against sellers, it is their business plan.

The terms and conditions are clearly stated before anyone starts an account. And if there was any question two minutes of discovery in any ebay related forum would quickly outline how ebay works.

Of course the terms and conditions favor the buyer, it HAS to work this way. ebay has always thought that their true customers are buyers. This throws many people a curve because they think that the sellers are ebay's customers because they are the ones paying the fees.

But this is not 1950, this is the internet and online business is done very differently. For ebay's business to plan to work at all it is absolutely required that buyers have extraordinary high level of confidence so they will buy something sight unseen (other than some altered and modified photos). If buyers lose this confidence than the entire business plan collapses.

Being critical of this business plan is 'biting the hand that feeds you'. These terms and conditions are exactly the reason that buyers favor ebay over all the other online buying venues.

The real issue at hand are people (buyers OR sellers) who are willing to take advantage of other people.
Don

My scope of selling has been rapidly shrinking. I no longer offer bulky items to non US buyers due to horrific postal costs but also due to their being targets for theft. I still offer to sell stamps and small items to foreign bidders but lately I have been cutting back on that. I will no longer offer anything other than inexpensive items to foreign bidders and those are limited to a few countries. I don't like it, but it is a jungle out there and having been burned once too often I am not risking it. Perhaps 90% of the losses I have had were to bidders outside the country. It happened maybe 2-3 times with US buyers in nearly twenty years. Do the math.

You have to protect yourself.

jimjamtwo: I don't understand how a buyer can reverse a payment once he won the bid or buy now;unless he asks you to cancel the sale for X reasons and you accept too refund.I mean paypal and e bay are the same thing;everything is recorded...
If I had a buyer like 2g5ytw6k2g5ytw6k0 I would really worry..

51studebaker is right - They protect the buyer not the seller. I've had a few instances where ebay covered my loss because I had used USPS tracking and it was clear that the item was delivered. In those cases, I was protected but there was no effect on the buyer other than that I blocked them from future purchases from me.

The rest of my losses -- in the brick and mortar world I think the euphemism is "shrinkage" and I just "deal with it" because the alternative is to do something else with my time.

To Stamps1962 I'd say that I make a lot of sales outside the USA and value those buyers -- they help my bottom line a lot more than "shrinkage" damages my bottom line.

Purchased 2 $20 items on 2 different days from one seller on ebay who is based in the Philippines.

When I opened the envelop there was not what I had purchased. Seller had proof of delivery.

ebay refused to get the seller to refund me. Totally closed me down. This could be that it was no longer their issue and saw it as a pay pal issue?Changes had been going on.

So after my refusal from ebay I tried pay pal.

Straight away I got a refund for the 1st item include mailing cost.

Then pay pal said the seller can no longer be contacted and in 3 weeks pay pal would send me my refund out of pay pal coffers. But guess what they never did.

Totally sad! As a seller you just have to pencil these extra costs into the sale price. It is the only way to beat it.

One trick to use when you are unsure about a buyer (e.g. one who has a very low number of feedbacks) is to mark the item as shipped but hold it for an extra day or 2. Then, if they pull this kind of scam after you marked the item out for shipment, you still have the stamp in your possession. I believe it's also possible to mark an item as shipped and even have a tracking number before paying for the postage. If not, you should be able to get a refund or credit for postage labels paid for but not used.

As a buyer, when you pay via paypal ALWAYS use the credit card option and especially try to use American Express. If you don't get satisfaction from either ebay or Paypal, your credit card company will reverse the charges pending an investigation. I've only done this maybe twice, but in the end I won in both cases.