Hi,
I ran into this issue with I assume a change in how the standard questions are listed for a buyer to contact a seller. I had two items in less than a month where a buyer opened a return request before a item was shipped and was still within the handling time. I contacted eBay which stated I had to accept the return which closed the case. The second buyer I asked them to close the case which they did and once they did that it removed the option on my end to cancel the transaction! I had to call eBay and speak to multiple support members who all were confused and had to manually credit me. They then said we don't have a way to know if you refunded a buyer, to which I took a screenshot from Paypal and sent it to the buyer for the CSR to see. A seller shouldn't be dinged for a buyer being lazy or an eBay system issue where they fail to first give the option for a buyer to request to cancel a transaction.
From eBay twitter who states basically, they can't be bothered to spend the time to fix it.
"With the return, I'm sorry if there was some miscommunication. Because you refunded the buyer, you didn't receive a defect on this case, so it doesn't impact your seller dashboard. However, I do see that it reflects on your seller performance metrics. These are separate from defects, and we don't have a way to appeal individual transactions. You're doing a great job and I see you're return rate is below that of your peers (keep up the great work!). If this were to cause you to go into very high (where it begins to impact you), we could certainly look into doing a manual override but these are very rare. Because this isn't currently impacting your overall metrics, we wouldn't be able to request to have this changed."
Regards,
