Issued a refund, buyer escalated case and now ebay wants me to refund again??

[thecatsmeowuk]

Hi

Anyone had this before, a buyer opened up a case because they did not receive their item. It was an international item so I guess it was lost on route or taking a very long time.

Anyway since it was a low amount £15 I just thought I'd refund and not risk sending another. I selected refund on the 12th of July. I know the refund is via an echeque or something so can take quite sometime (not sure why its soo slow). 

Anyway the buyer was expected the refund by now and so escalted the case. When signing into the case the only option is to issue a refund again which is odd. No option to send any further messages, seems like kind of a bug to me. 

Tom

[m25jet]

When you refunded the buyer did you refund the money via eBay or PayPal?  If you refunded the money via eBay then the refund ought to be showing up, in which case eBay shouldn't still be trying to force you to refund the buyer's money.  If you did refund the buyer's money via eBay then contact eBay Customer Services about the matter, making sure that you quote the item number of the item for which you issued the refund.  Make it clear to the person you are speaking to that you had no objections to refunding the buyer's money and have already done so, but you are now being asked to refund the buyer's money again.  Ask eBay to check your account for you.  If they take the time to check it closely and see that the refund has in fact been issued then it may be that the message you received telling you to issue the refund after you had already done so was sent to you in error, in which case you shouldn't be asked to refund the buyer again.  Should that indeed turn out to be the case then eBay ought to close the case for you, as there is no further need for you to refund the buyer's money.

In the event that you refunded the buyer via PayPal then the refund may well not be showing up at eBay's end, hence the message to refund the buyer.  If you did refund the money via PayPal then unless you can prove to eBay that you have indeed issued a full refund of the buyer's money, albeit via PayPal, then they may well force you to refund the money via eBay regardless of the fact that you've already issued the refund owing to the fact that as far as they're concerned you never actually refunded the money because there is nothing showing up on eBay's records to prove that you have actually done so.

[rusticrye]

Refunds only happen via e-cheque when there is no money available in your PayPal account or linked bank account. It's not the norm. E-cheques obviously take the same amount of time to clear as any paper cheque - up to 10 days - but that does not affect an Ebay case in any way (unless something has very recently changed). The case would still have auto-closed - if you had refunded through the case as you must always do.

So, as the other responders have said, it seems you didn't refund in full through the opened case. If you had, the case would have automatically closed, ie. the buyer would not have been able to escalate it to Ebay as unresolved. (And the selling fee would have been auto-credited back to your Ebay account, which it won't be if you refund in any other way.)

So how did you refund...? Unless you provide that essential information, no-one can accurately advise you.

@thecatsmeowuk 

[john1297576]

Looks as though you refunded the wrong wayand will have been charged the selling fee.

Once a case is opened and the money in Paypal is frozen so that it is available for the refund, and you cannot access it, so how did you refund? If you just sent a paypal payment, that would not be the money received by you and that will still sit there waiting to be refunded. 

As Ebay cannot see your Paypal account you are going to find it difficult to convince them that you have refunded. It might pay to speak to paypal as they can see the transactions although how they can fix this I don't know, unless they can cancel the "echeque", then you could refund properly through the case.