I cannot refund.

[theonewhoismany]

Item was sold on the 2th of August, shipped without tracking. Buyer opens a request today, stating the item never arrived. I know I have to refund, but when I go to the Resolution centre and hit refund I get the following error:

The refund failed

There was a problem sending your refund to the buyer

To try again or to see what's wrong, go to Paypal

I logged into Paypal, looked up the transaction and surprisingly the money is not blocked. I seem to still have the option to reverse the payment through Paypal, but I know that will give me an Out of Stock defect which I'd rather avoid.

Has anyone encountered this problem before?

[dakotasmoke]

The buyer is too late to ask for a refund on ebay.

You CAN refund directly out of paypal, or just explain that ebay has a 30 day time window to ask for a refund and then go silent

[theonewhoismany]

No, he's not. It's an international sale (with me being in the Netherlands and the buyer being in the US), so he has 30 days after the estimated delivery date to open a case - which he did.

Unfortunately my problem remains the same - I need to refund but cannot do so through the resolution centre. How to solve this without incurring any defects?

[dtexley3]

make the "dreaded" call to CS.  

[reallynicestamps]

I had an international* refund recently and found that Paypal would not release the funds for over two weeks.

I had more than enough money in both my Canadian dollar and US dollar Paypal accounts.

Fortunately, my customer was calm about it. Calmer than I was actually.

But the actual refund was fine, just the release of funds was held up.

*I'm in Canada, customer in US, listed on dotCOM in US dollars.

[theonewhoismany]

The plot thickens. Buyer has send me a message thought the Resolution centre stating that they closed their Paypal account. I can see how that would complicate things... Sigh. I hope they can simply reactivate their account, but I probably won't be that lucky.

[tarpedge]

That you spell center "centre" instead means you can send email or chat from as well, rather than be restricted to only call eBay for help with your problem.

[pjcdn2005]

If the sale was made on this site which is where the seller lists, wouldn't the seller have to deal with the .com customer service in the same way that we do?

[theonewhoismany]

I'm from the Netherlands and that is where my account has been registered. I have send an email to the Dutch customer service, but am yet to receive a reply. I too am assuming that since the sale was on ebay.com, I will have to contact the US customer service by phone. Unfortunately my spoken English is much inferior to my written English, so I am rather dreading having to make the call.

[castlemagicmemories]

I agree.

[j4dice001]

I had this same problem a onth ago and Paypal said that I had to call eBay since there was a hold on the transaction.  I called eBay and after spending a hour on the phone with a rep and then a supervisor, neither had any idea how to fix it.  The supervisor finally said to wait until the buyer was refunded automaticllay by eBay then call and have the defect removed, which I did.  You would think that they would try to find what the issue is here and fix it, but then that would take some brains and some work.  Had the same problem today and called again.  The rep was just as clueless as the last time and finally said that he couldn't do anything because "the buyer's Paypal account was not set up to take refunds" and I'd have to call Paypal.  Called Paypal and their rep got a good laugh out of that explanation saying there's no such thing and an account that doesn't accept refunds.  He was able to force a refund despite the hold, however.  Perhaps one day eBay will decide to look into this issue and actually correct it instead of having its reps give out **bleep** answers and blaming it on Paypal.