I sold an item (thermal printer) to someone in Japan. I did some research and found out that Lithium batteries are prohibited to import there.

I have already explained the situation and refunded the buyer. <- That was all yesterday.

Today, I was chatting with eBay (via the online help chat feature) and they gave me the run-around, not really answering my question on how to cancel this transaction without getting an account defect, until the 5th time I asked the question. S/he said to (paraphrasing): "mark the item as shipped and move the listing to the deleted section." They also said that: "any negative will be removed" but I don't know how true that would be.

But, if I mark the item as shipped, but don't actually ship it to them (because I can't), won't I still get a I.N.R claim?

I've searched Google and couldn't find the answer to my problem, so I'd thought I'd ask here. This is the first time it has happened to me.

This is also the first time I sold something to someone outside of Australia. I put the listings to ship worldwide, but never had anyone not in Australia purchase anything because of the high shipping cost (I ship direct). Should I just stick with selling within Australia to prevent this sort of thing happening again? I don't want to always check what items are prohibited in the buyers' country, because they didn't do it themselves.