Not got item, not got our money back either

[buttercupsanddaisies]

My husband bought a vacuum cleaner on February 12th. The seller sent it by Evri and after about a week of reading the fiction that is Evri tracking we put in a claim for INR. It was clearly lost (we don't have a Evri person covering our postcode, once a week or so a relief driver in a van comes and brings everything in one go). The seller contacted Evri and redirected the package to go back to him and on March 5th ebay told us we would have to wait until March 15th to get a refund. Two days ago the tracking changed to show the item had been delivered on March 2nd but also showing the item was redirected to the sender a couple of days before that! Insane. So we used the Evri CEO email we found on Reddit and amazingly got an immediate response from a guy saying the parcel had been delivered back to the sender. We went in to ebay today to get the case closed and get a refund but ebay have declined and closed the case saying the item has been delivered. I mean what the hell? We have uploaded the email from Evri and the ebay tracking is actually saying that it was redirected back to the seller so how have they found in the seller's favour? He has the item back and has got to keep our money. My husband was an idiot and used funds instead of a credit card so a chargeback is out of the question. How likely are ebay to listen to our appeal? What should our next step be? He actually went and bought the same item off Facebook Marketplace last week, I wish he had looked there in the first place. 

[m25jet]

You say in your post "My husband was an idiot and used funds instead of a credit card so a chargeback is out of the question" (bit harsh, in my opinion - your husband wasn't to know that the seller and eBay would both screw you over), but when you refer to funds, where did the funds come from?  If your husband paid for the vacuum cleaner using funds from a PayPal account then the next course of action would be for your husband to log into PayPal and open an Item Not Received case against the seller there.  PayPal tend to look into cases far more closely than eBay do, so when they put a trace on the tracking and see that the item was never delivered to you but was, in fact, delivered back to the seller then they ought to refund the money in full that your husband paid for the vacuum cleaner.  However, your husband also ought to bear in mind that should the seller become obstructive and it starts to look as though no progress is being made with the case at all then he would need to ensure that he escalates the case to PayPal before their twenty day cut-off point in order to get the matter resolved.