Paypal cancelled payments, but order still received?

[lucyandrea92]

Hello Paypal Community!

Hoping for some guidance as I have yet to find a clear answer to this.

Over the past month or so, I made several payments with my Paypal account to the online on-demand grocery retailer, Gorillas. These have been set up as e-cheque payments I believe (the payment is linked to my bank account, which means that when I make the payment, it takes 3-5 working days for the payment to be withdrawn from my account).

The issue I am now having is that I have received all my grocery orders, but I haven't actually paid for them. This is because I did not have sufficient funds in my bank account when Paypal attempted to withdraw the funds. Now, when this happened in the past, Paypal would put my account into negative balance, which I would clear. This hasn't happened with these orders, they have been cancelled and I called Paypal on Friday and they simply said my bank rejected the funds withdrawal, but that I don't owe them any money. Surely that can't be right; I fully intend to pay whoever I owe money to but I'm confused if this should be Paypal or the retailer directly. Does anyone have a similar experience to this?

Thank you!

[PayPal_Meghan]

Hello @lucyandrea92, 

Thanks for reaching out and posting your first question on the Community! 

If I understand correctly, you have recently made some grocery purchases, and even though the payments didn't go through, you still received the groceries. I apologize for the confusion this has caused. When you look at the transactions on your PayPal Activity Page, do they say e-Cheque or instant transfer? If they say e-Cheque, that means we didn't send the money to the merchant right away and were waiting until it cleared from your bank. If the merchant didn't realize this, they might have still sent the groceries. I suggest reaching out to them and letting them know what happened. 

Alternatively, if the payments say instant transfer, that means we had sent the money to the merchant, and it should have been pulled from your balance when the transactions didn't clear. If you already had a balance, that could be why you didn't see the account fall negative. As a couple of scenarios may have happened, please feel free to reach out to Customer Support if you need any help sorting through the transactions. You can reach our Customer Support by selecting 'Contact' or 'Help and Contact' at the bottom of our website. 

I hope this information helps and everything is resolved soon! 

- Meghan