More Transaction Frustration

I find all too often that sellers make certain situations very difficult for buyers. A seller recently mailed the wrong item to me. She realized her mistake and emailed me to refuse the package. I bought the item on my secondary account and did not check my messages until after I received the package. Even if I had checked my messages before I opened the package, I would not have wanted to write "refused" on the package and hope that it would somehow make it back to the seller.

Since I did open the package, I had to package it again in order to prepare it for mailing. The seller's actions (or lack of) made my next step much more difficult. First of all, the seller sent me a PayPal payment rather than simply refunding part of what I paid her. Since it was sent as a payment, I had to pay $0.47 in fees, so what I received was less than what I needed for the postage. Aside from that, the seller did not click on the selection to include her address when she sent the payment, so that I did not have her address as part of the payment file. This was what caused me to go to more trouble than necessary. If the seller had included her address in the payment, I would have had a handy link in which I could have very quickly created a shipping label without having to type all of the information in myself. Sigh . . .

I then went to my original payment to the seller. I have discovered that if a seller accepts returns, then there is a handy link in the original payment file so that a buyer can easily create a shipping label. Needless to say, this seller had that feature blocked. I had no choice but to get the outer wrapping from the seller's package and manually type her address into the PayPal Ship Now page:

https://www.paypal.com/shipnow

I am giving the link here because this is a little-known piece of information. If I did not know about PayPal Ship Now from reading eBay's message boards, I would have had no way of generating a shipping label for my return transaction. I cannot even find a link to PayPal Ship Now on the PayPal site, and I have tried more than once. This link is good for whenever a package has to be sent to someone, and there is not an associated PayPal transaction.

In the past, I have had multiple sellers send me refunds by sending me a payment instead of using the refund link. One time, I told a seller ahead of time that all transactions have a refund link near the bottom of the page and to use it instead of sending a payment. That seller said she couldn't find it and sent me a payment. Here is a screen capture of the lower part of the screen for a PayPal payment that I received recently with all personal information removed:


I highlighted the refund part in yellow so that it would stand out. It is not that hard to find. It may be that some people are afraid to use it, thinking that they might accidentally refund all of the payment. When "Issue Refund" is selected, the next page has the seller enter the amount, and then a second page asks for the seller to confirm the amount. As long as the seller confirms the amount, there is no way that a seller can accidentally refund all of the payment.