@1786davycrockett wrote:
The refund period from PayPal is 180 days, while the return period for eBay is only 30 days.
I do agree with you that the PayPal refund period is ridiculous -- NO "big box" store would ever allow a buyer to walk in off the street, to do a return from nearly 6 months ago! The manager would have Security on the phone within minutes.
PayPal definitely needs to change these egrigious policies, as they leave a very wide open door for buyer abuse -- and we have enough of that, as it is.
The refund period on PayPal forces the buyer to pay return shipping. Unless they are in that scheme that only gives them 12 returns a year where PayPal pay the shipping *if* the item is still within the return period defined by the seller.
I've been losing too much money on eBay via people buying the wrong item and lately, refusing to admit it. Skirting the issue. Not responding when I link them to the correct item and ask "this is the one you intended to buy, isn't it?" I can tell they bought the wrong item via the behavior of the reported "fault."
If a buyer opens a return for this reason and refuses to admit fault, I lose shipping both ways plus fees on the item. A grand total of $8. It doesn't sound a lot but when you figure out that you refunded the buyer in full plus paid the USPS and eBay for the trouble of dealing with them, you start to realize that this can not go on. I don't mind that I have to refund the buyer. It doesn't matter, I can resell such sparsely used items. I just want the ability to tell them "this one is your fault" and for that to be final. For the buyer to pay for the lost shipping. No denials by buyer, no lost $8 - $8 being most of the profits lost on the resale. I worked on that cable for nothing. I'm always 100% honest when the fault was on my end. But I'd like to be equally honest when it was not, instead of just rolling over.
In other words when a buyer opens a case like this on eBay, you can either throw up your hands and lose $8 on a $25 item (average selling cost) or play back and forth with the buyer, get them to admit they bought the wrong item (and I will say that most are entirely reasonable about this, but I've had two over the last two weeks who were not) and then have to phone eBay to get case closed in your favour. I'm not sure the large amount of messing around there is even worth $8.
When the buyer is overseas and you find yourself paying their return shipping just to avoid a negative, this starts to turn into the kind of joke that causes me to have to charge an extra premium to overseas buyers to cover instances of this. I have to charge that on top of the ludicrous USPS overseas charges. I don't like doing it, because I already have very little foreign trade due to the absolutely awful USPS international rate for anything that goes over the 3/4" limit. I also don't like paying for the mistakes of others and I especially don't like forcing that system on others. Funnily enough overseas buyers pull this stunt way more commonly than US buyers, given that most of what I sell is US-centric and incompatible with their hardware (barring those from countries on the entire American continent). The only reason I don't block them is last time I did (over Christmas when selling international is fraught with issues), I saw one of them telling my *US BUYERS* on a very politically liberal forum that I visit that I was unfriendly to international trade and to buy off my competitor instead. The daftest thing about this is I'm an immigrant, not even from this country, so this isn't an anti foreigner stance, it's an "eBay is too risky and potentially expensive" stance. I'm about to solve this problem without blocking non North American/South American trade, because....
That will *not* happen on my website, it only happens on eBay. I don't know how long I am going to be here. I'm already bottlenecking my trade here on purpose because I am now selling half of it elsewhere. PayPal return period is absolutely fine, because I *don't pay postage.*
