Your best option is to ask the seller if they can cancel the sale, perhaps citing 'problem with address' as the reason. Sellers can suffer some consequences if they cancel sales through their own fault-I am not sure exactly how it works (long time since I was a seller) but a downgrade to their account? Something like that. But if it is the buyer who wants the cancellation, that's different. The seller will be okay if cancelling for that.
Your account won't suffer at all either if the seller cancels for an approved reason.
If the seller does not cancel, you can make an ebay claim. You have 30 days.
If that didn't work out, you can most definitely make a claim via paypal if you paid that way. It will make no difference that it was a pick up item, the fact you don't have the item is enough.
I know this for a fact as we had this happen to us as sellers. A person who lived in the next suburb demanded that we post a pick up item and when we said no, they reluctantly said they would pick up, but the next we knew, they had opened a paypal claim and had a refund.
Just make sure you don't open 2 claims at once. Try ebay, then paypal, in that order.
The seller would be far better off to cancel the sale because if they let things go to the stage where you open a claim, they can't even give you a strike of any kind for non payment.
Re feedback, it does still have some relevance and it is always worth looking at if you are making a purchase. A buyer can still give a negative or neutral to a seller. It is just that a seller can only give a positive, but they do of course have the option to leave no feedback at all.
So when you look at a person's feedback, look at 'feedback as a seller', so you can check if someone with eg 50 feedback, actually has any of it as a seller.
