@lacemaker3 wrote:
...
- If YOUR payment is being held, then PayPal will use the held funds to give YOU a refund. (That's the purpose of holding your funds.)
- You don't have to close the dispute in order to release the funds covered by the dispute. That's not how it works. Never close the dispute until you have the refund in hand.
- It sounds like the seller's PayPal account is negative because of other issues related to other transactions, but in that case, PayPal would have issued the refund as an e-check against the selelr's bank account. They wouldn't have declined to send it (which is what it sounds like).
I think the seller must have tried to "Send" you the money, rather than refunding from the payment transaction, which is the correct way to do a refund from PayPal. When he sends money, it has to come from his balance (which is probably negative so it can't come from that) or a back up funding source (usually his bank account).
The proper way to do a refund is through eBay. The seller can send you an offer for a partial refund, and you can accept that offer if it is acceptable to you. This will be in the eBay Resolution Center. The refund is made from the money (in PayPal) which is being held from your payment transaction. This way, the refund can't be made twice by accident, which the seller was concerned about.
I have experienced this from the buyer's perspective.
In my situation, the seller sent a refund as an "e-check", and it bounced, so I didn't receive the refund until I escalated the issue to eBay and they took care of refunding me because the seller didn't fulfill their obligations.
From communicating with the seller, they tried to issue a refund because they coudn't get access to the funds in PayPal to pay for the item I had purchased. (Not a valid reason to cancel a transaction.) The funds were held probably because the seller had other (previous) cases that were were putting their funds into "held" status (due to eBay cases for INR or SNAD, probably also related to transactions that were cancelled for invalid reasons).
eBay refunded me (in the end) and charged the seller for the cost of the refund, and gave them a defect because they didn't resolve the issue without eBay stepping in (they didn't resolve my issue). FYI at last check the seller was NARU because they ddidn't complete transactions for their buyers.
If your seller had properly refunded you, then you would have received the refund.
If you want to argue about it, then you can waste your own time, but it won't make any difference unless you let a deadline pass to get a refund, in which case you won't get a refund that you might otherwise have been entitled to.
