Flakey ebay sellers and slow PayPal refunds

[JP Owens]

I've bought a lot of stuff on eBay, with generally good experience. But I recently bought a "Buy it now" lens from an auction where the seller had 138 sells with 100% rating. Sounded good.

After I sent the payment, and received the email confirmation, etc., about 5 minutes later, the seller refunded the money, and within minutes relisted the lens at $100 more than I had paid for it. Well, other than bad juju for the seller, that shouldn't be a problem. Unfortunately, PayPal has shown the refund as pending for two weeks now, and they tell me to contact them if it doesn't go through in a couple of more weeks.

So, because of a flakey seller, I end up with my money tied up for a month, perhaps. That's a first for me.

 

[ForestCap]

Once I won a camera cheaply and then the seller changed shipping fee to $50+ (should be no more than $22). I quoted their country's post office website with price-list and kindly asked for recalculation of the post fee and he answered he would need the extra bucks to buy packaging material. I didnt want someone using endangered birch tree barks to pack things so I had the sale cancelled.

 

[Huss]

Call paypal. You can actually get a service rep on the phone. Esplain it to them, they will speed up the refund.

 

[Fixcinater]

This could be because the seller took the $ out of his paypal account (instant transfer is now a thing) and then didn't have the $ in Paypal to do an instant refund, thereby waiting for his bank/cc to issue the slower refund.

Could be a way to get a "free loan" for a few days time with no interest. Not endorsing this practice, just saying it is potentially why this happened.