PayPal refund fees

[Brothershenn]

I just talked to PayPal telephone rep. He said that a seller can refund a buyer oFF Ebay sale and there is no processing fee. That is in contradiction to PayPal own internal policy as of may 9 2019 which states processing fees will not be refunded. In other words seller will have to eat the cost of refunds . This is unfair. For example if I sold a toy on Ebay for 100 dollars and my net balance is 97 dollars. Suddenly the buyer said that she did not want it and ask me to refund her money from PayPal and I approved, I can refund her 100 dollars back but PayPal still deducts $3 from my checking account. The PayPal rep said NO , PayPal will not keep their $3. This is in contradiction to the PayPal policy online as of may 9. Apparently the rep is not even up to date about their own company's policy. Anybody else ????

[sharpiemarker · Accepted solution]

@Brothershenn 

PayPal supposedly held off on the May 7th policy update (but left it on the books) but I have seen instances where some users are not partially refunded the variable PayPal fee upon issuing a refund and deducting the entire fee and some are reporting still are being refunded partially as wellte after the May7th update. Perhaps a glitch or perhaps they are slowly rolling it out. In any event, when issuing a refund, PayPal shows you the break down of the refund before finalizing it so I suggest that if you are issuing a refund due to buyer's reasons such as changed mind, to deduct the fee from the refund and letting the buyer know this fee deduction before issuing refund for this order or in the future. There are no rules against doing this.

[danana]

This is not the solution,

I wasn't refunded the fee from an accidental transaction refund yesterday.

A customer accidentally paid the invoice twice. I refunded one of the payments. Paypal did not refund the payment.
I called customer service and I was told that when you are a business, you can't do that. When I asked how is this fair for an accidental transaction, I was told that this is what I signed up for, so I it's on me.

This is not fair.

I understand paypal wants to keep their cut on refunds just because they can, but accidental transactions should be an exception and there should be a time limit or something when a transaction can count as accidental with the fee refunded.

If I am not getting a reply back, I will be moving my accounts from paypal both personal and business. Never felt paypal was greedy before, but this shows they are.
Thank you for your time.

[bdeyring]

Agreed.  This problem is NOT resolved for those of us who use PayPal in conjunction with eBay.

[bdeyring]

This is an option when refunding directly via PayPal, but there is frequently no option to issue a partial refund when processing said refund through ebay.

If I were to bypass ebay and issue the partial refund through PayPal, I would be unable to reclaim my fees paid to ebay.

How do you propose solving this issue?

[thelewii]

They are now going to enforce this beginning in October.   It should be noted that many other payment processors do not keep the fee contrary to Paypal's statement of this being an industry accepted practice.

[bdeyring]

Official email received stating that this will commence on Nov. 1 😡

This is outright theft and lies - no other processor retains transaction fees in the event of refund, and certainly not on the order of 2.9%!

This is NOT standard industry practice and it is not acceptable!!!!

[bdeyring]

This serves no one but the larger orgs who can absorb these types of costs into their overhead, or negotiate more favorable terms with PP

This will further push smaller businesses off the map of eCommerce and into the abyss 😡😡😡😡

[nickfowler9]

Completely agreed!  I am closing my business account today and switching to more small business friendly alternatives.  Aloha Paypal! 🙂

[temp20200404a]

This is terrible-another example of a corporation doing what it wants and two fingers up to the customer (who put them in the place of success of which they are currently in). It will ONLY stop if we all made a stand and said 'we are not taking this anymore!'

They win through simple apathy....Stand up people!!!