eBay Hacks, 2nd Edition

Issue a Refund

Give your customer her money back without incurring additional fees or risking negative feedback, and then relist your item for free.

After you’ve sold something on eBay, usually the last thing in the world you want is to see it again, let alone part with the money you got for it. But refunds are a fact of life in a trading community where your reputation means everything.

If the customer paid for your item with PayPal, use PayPal’s Refund feature instead of trying to send the buyer a new payment. Just log into PayPal and go to My Account → History. Find the transaction in the list, click Details, and then click Refund Payment at the bottom of the page.

Next, you’ll see the Refund Offer page, shown in Figure 6-6. Fill in Gross Refund Amount with either the total amount of the original payment or the amount of your partial refund [Hack #88] , and click Submit.

PayPal gives you 60 days to refund your payments, after which time the feature will no longer be available. If you need to refund a payment after 60 days, you’ll need to use the Send Money tab to send an ordinary PayPal payment. This means, among other things, that your seller fees won’t be refunded, which should be good incentive to handle returns promptly.

Tip

Since your customer may be upset at the prospect of having to pay a percentage of his refund to PayPal, you may wish to spend an extra few bucks and use PayPal’s Mass Pay feature to pay the seller fees [Hack #34] .

Credit cards.

If a customer paid you directly ...