mam98031 • Volunteer Community Member • Buyer/Seller since 1999
This is what I do. I send the buyer an email giving them the options.
We can handle this one of two ways. For myself both options are fine, I just want you to pick the best option for you.
1. When I receive the item I can refund you for the Purchase price of the item less the shipping and any non refundable selling fees I have.
or
2. If you want to send me your Email address I can go to PayPal and issue you an invoice for the reshipment of the item which would match what you originally paid for shipping. So you would get an invoice from PayPal. When you pay that invoice, please make sure your ship to address is correct. Then pay the invoice. I will then reship your package.
The thing to make absolutely sure you do is if your buyer wants you to reship the item is to create your shipping label from the PAYPAL payment. Do NOT come back to Ebay to generate that label on the original transaction for reasons I stated above.
Do not send to the new address by creating the shipping label on Ebay. That will cause you issues. It will over-write the tracking on the original shipment, so you lose that history and it will then show up as a late shipment. And it will show you shipped to a different address than the buyer originally gave you so you lose seller protection. So don't create a new label from the original shipment.
@jdmem2_02 wrote:I'm having this issue right now. Spoke with ebay and they said I owe the buyer nothing for this. It is not the sellers issue the buyer doesn't have a correct address. Why would a seller pay back shipping and ebay fees when the seller doesn't get that money. The buyer needs to take that up with ebay. I didn't ask for this person to bid on my item and have a wrong address. I did my part sent out the item not my fault they didn't receive it.
Sellers are required to ship to the address on the payment in order to be covered by seller protection. While this is a buyer issue, a seller needs to offer the customer service to work with the buyer to get the item resolved.
Why would a seller refund, because it is the correct thing to do. You should not ship it to a known bad address. Communicate with your buyer and tell them what the problem is. Let them know that you will fully refund them and then they will need to come back and purchase the item again for the same price. And you will make sure there is a listing available for them to purchase from. Good idea to give them a link to that listing.
You can cancel the transaction for a problem with the address. And then fully refund the buyer. Make sure they are clear as to what they need to do.
As to refunding a buyer and your FVFs you pay to Ebay. You have assumed you don't get that money back and that is not correct. When you refund a buyer in full or in part, the appropriate FVFs are refunded to the seller.
@usgrant18642008 wrote:I can't recall all the particulars, but I had one bad selling experience on something that I offered free shipping on. Ever since then, I've always charged something for shipping - even if I have to lower the price of the item for sale in order to balance out the cost to the buyer. It's all a wash anyway - the final cost is the cost.
Good plan. If you offer free shipping then your cost of the shipping should be rolled into the price of your product you are selling. If you are doing stated shipping, then you should not add the cost of shipping into your product price because you are charging separately for it.
