Buyer put in wrong address, only option is to refund them. Will Paypal will keep the fee.

KazumaChan
New Community Member

This hardly seems fair at the moment, but some buyer bought something on an app and put in their address wrong. The only option I have is to still ship the item ( if the house is their neighbours/family members for example) or refund it and have paypal take the processing fee of almost £7 for absolutely nothing. Not very sure on what to do here, seeing as its not a return or even a proper refund can I contact paypal to have them refund that fee as well? Because at this point I'm going to have the app taking 10% (£12) to fight for and this £7 possibly just lost all because of a buyer. Is there anything to protect us from this sort of thing? If this transaction was in the thousands I could be losing hundreds over nothing :/.

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sharpiemarker
Esteemed Advisor
Esteemed Advisor

@KazumaChan 

 

This has been happening with businesses like forever. It just that PayPal have decided to get rid of the perk. No, PayPal won't refund the fee when issuing refund. 

 

https://www.paypal.com/uk/smarthelp/article/how-do-i-issue-a-refund-faq780

 

"If you refund a payment for goods or services, there are no fees to issue the refund, but the fees you originally paid as the seller are not returned to you. The amount of the refunded payment will be deducted from your PayPal account."

 

You may consider deducting the PayPal fee amount from the refund amount instead. For example, you deduct £7 from the gross total amount received and enter difference as the amount to refund.

 

The only way to avoid this in future payments is to start using authorization to capture method (A2C), where the payment process is essentially broken down to 2 separate steps instead of being just one by default (because people want their money right away). It first initiates a temporary authorization, then awaits for you to capture (receive) the funds at a later time. This allows for Voiding or Canceling of the payment without receiving it and incurring none or much less fees (flat rate only?) when you see a problem with a payment such as wrong shipping address or customer changed their mind and want to cancel.

 

For more info:

https://developer.paypal.com/docs/admin/auth-capture/

https://developer.paypal.com/docs/integration/direct/payments/authorize-and-capture-payments/


Kudos & Solved are greatly appreciated. 🙂
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