avoid defects - send money

[stampingpaws]

Rather than refund money from the payment made why not just send money to the buyer. This would use a completely different transaction.

Should work til they change the rules AGAIN!

[cq_tech]

Nice one, paws. A really logical and sensible suggestion at last. 🙂

[diecastcarsvicki]

ok till buyers says they havent recived refund and you will be forced by paypal to refund a second time.

[lyndal1838]

Your buyers will be mighty unhappy when they have to pay fees on the money you send them.

[harley_babes_hoard]

Bad move--- if something should go wrong you will not have a leg to stand on. What's to say you send buyer money for some reason instead of refunding, The transaction does not correspond with any ebay transaction. The buyer opens a item not described or not received and claims a refund. Because you don't have proof of the send money being for that ebay transaction paypal would most likely refund the buyer. You are then out of 2 lots of funds.

[nevillesdaughter]

I received 4 defect strikes because I had refunded excess postage where people had made multiple purchases (I do free postage listings). The defects showed up as "refunds for run out of stock or item sold to someone else" on my seller dashboard. I had a hell of a fight with eBay to have them removed (and won) but was told that any refunded amount would be logged as a defect.

I know people have been told different stories about this by different eBay reps, but I now send any refund or discount as a "send money" transaction rather than a refund. I put on the message section what it is and if I ever found myself accused of not sending it would expect to be able to point Paypal to the transaction as proof.

I would still rather risk doing it this way than copping a heap of defects again for trying to do the right thing by my customers.

Marina.

[harley_babes_hoard]

I have done plenty of partial refunds without defects.

[beach_and_home]

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@harley_babes_hoard wrote:

I have done plenty of partial refunds without defects.

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yes, me too. I don't understand/believe that people are saying they are getting defects for these partial refunds. They must be doing something different to the way I do it. Or perhaps they are seeing a defect for something else and just assuming it is for the partial refund? For those that say they have had it happen, have you actually checked the 'downloaded report' which lists the actual item number that the defect is for? And are you sure that the defect is for the refund and not for another different buyer?

[ambridgebuckskins]

Beach - yes, l have defects for refunding the postage part of a payment when a buyer has purchased more than one item and paid (without waiting for a combined invoice).

For example - one buyer purchased and paid for 5 items, each with a postage of $8.90. Those items could be combined for a postage cost of $15.05 instead of the $44.50 they paid.

l knew if l returned all her payments so l could issue a new invoice - that would be a defect and there is not longer a refund on the eBay postage fee.

No way could l let the payments all go through and pocket the extra $29.45.

So l returned just the postage part on as many transactions as it took to pay back her money. Each one of those refunds shows as a defect on the report.

Where eBay say only one defect per transaction, it shows (at the moment) as 4 defects - exactly the amount of postage payments l refunded.

I've spoken to eBay three times over it. They cannot do anything about it until their 'dedicated' team works out some finer points.

At the moment, this stands:

Thanks for contacting eBay about the defect rating.
As of now we dont have a way to remove a defect rating, since this is not yet final, this will take effect by August. We are still working on ways to help out our sellers, and thanks for letting us know. We will update all our sellers as soon as we have means to remove a defect rating.

Do you think that enhances the buyer experience? The buyer dosen't want to know about defects or anything, they want to buy, pay and receive which is the general idea of selling online.

But eBay have now bought in this big stick that hits us with defects - our buyer won't have the smaller seller to purchase from as we will have been downrated so far, we vanish.

It all needs fixing.