Seller telling me they will not ship my items unless I close the dispute.

[Jjsc22]

I used a parcel forwarding service to ship 10 parcels (valued at around $800 in total) which were stored at the forwarding company's USA warehouse to my address in Australia. The company is based in France and I used their forwarding services previously to have parcels posted from Europe, but wanted to make use of saving on shipping fees during the Black Friday sales by using their warehouse in the US. This company has high ratings on trust pilot and I have been using them since 2016. After making a payment of 202 euro on 16/12/22 (excluding taxes and customs fees), 1 article was flagged by the staff as 'hazardous'. I explained that this was a misunderstanding based on the packaging of the item (it was a nail cuticle oil comprising of essential oils but packaged in a nail polish bottle, hence the staff would have assumed this was nail polish) and because I realised this would get complicated, I requested that the warehouse just leave out this 1 item out from my main delivery, return it to the original merchant and proceed to ship the remaining 9 parcels to my Australian address. The seller agreed that they could action this. However, Since the date of my request, the seller has not posted my parcels in storage and I am struggling to get any confirmation on the status of my delivery. While I understand the would be delays during the holiday period, each time I follow up I am told that they are awaiting a response from the US warehouse and I am given no answer/timeline to expect my parcels to be shipped . As I felt like we were just going in circles, I created a case with paypal in an attempt to get a final resolution. Not long after I created the PayPal case I received an email from the company telling me to ‘close the case in order to have the parcels sent to me’. I responded telling them that I will no longer be communicating over email and we will I’ll need to resolve this in the PayPal dispute and immediately made a screenshot of this and attached it to my case and then escalated it to PayPal. I’m starting to stress out as it has been 20 days now (I paid for express delivery to receive these items between 5-7 days before Christmas as a number of these items were Christmas presents). Have I followed the process correctly by immediately escalating? If the seller continues to communicate with me outside the case telling me they will not ship my parcels, how should I proceed? Also, what would happen if these items were disposed of/resold by the seller? These items were not the service I am disputing and I worry I could be losing a lot of money.

[sharpiemarker]

@Jjsc22 

Well, it’s in PayPal’s hands now since you’ve disputed and escalated and you couldn’t risk the seller not shipping the parcels and not able to open another case if you did closed it. If freight forwarder cannot provide proof of delivery, PayPal is likely to rule in your favor. At least you cut your losses by winning a couple hundred back than lose it all.

If you paid by credit card, maybe you can chance closing the PayPal case to see if seller would ship and failing that, you file a credit card chargeback on the freight forwarder for the shipping cost.

Nothing can really be done about cost of items you bought. It wouldn’t be fair to the merchants of those goods because they did nothing wrong. You put someone else in charge of shipping instead of each merchant shipping right to you. 

Sometimes the cheap comes out expensive. Freight forwarder would sell the items to cover their loss.