how to deal with potential purchase change of ship address, getting hit with fees on refund?

[Davery2112]

Hey all

I have a new trend on tech items I am selling.  A buyer buys the item, pays then immediately asks for a change in shipping address.  I believe these are hijacked accounts (happened 3X on one iphone!).  They all have some crazy story as to why the "item" (always referred to as "the item" red flag) needs different addressing.  Aware of the seller protection rules, I tell them I cannot do that, but then cancel so they can re-purchase.  They never do.  So in this case, for a $200 item, I get my ebay fees back but lose my paypal fees.  Worse yet, I get hit with them again for the next sale.  

I am asking for best practice here.  Should I refund them price less fees?  I don't think I can even do that with the interface.  This is scaring me as I have some items that carry a $35-50 pp fee on them.  I feel helpless to lose any miserable margin I have on these items.  Worse yet would be to ship them and get a return or a fraud charge I guess, but still I would like to get feedback on how you all handle this.

[sharpiemarker]

@Davery2112 

Yeah, its the pits that the eBay/PayPal set up is not Authorization2Capture like if had your own website set up with PayPal checkout integrated or creating your own PayPal button/email url with that variable. Then the 30 cent fee applies if you cancel an order. Maybe it works that way with business accounts linked into eBay, I dunno?  

You can deduct the fee, there's no policy against that on PayPal.

This is why I never liked the instant checkout especially with all these strange payments and scammers and people can't do a simple thing like making sure their shipping address is correct, especially where I sell, you'd think they would. But since you're selling electronics, you'd draw these kinds of strange/sketchy buyers more often than not.

[Davery2112]

Thanks, yes I would be more than ok with the .30 transaction fee but the 2.9% fee is what gets me.  

[sharpiemarker · Accepted solution]

---

@Davery2112 wrote:

Thanks, yes I would be more than ok with the .30 transaction fee but the 2.9% fee is what gets me.  

---

Shoot, if PayPal upped the flat rate to 50 cents in exchange for refunding the variable rate, I'd be fine with that too. 🙂