eBay have updated the INR (item not received) process which has in recent times been moved from eBay to the PayPal site. It’s worth remembering that nowadays buyers have little or no buyer protection unless they pay via PayPal.
The main changes are adding the ability to negotiate partial refunds and an indication of how long each step in the process will take. Also there is closer integration with eBay which enables the eBay dispute console to show the status of claims as the process progresses.
It’s not all plain sailing however, reports are coming in of sellers trying to view the claims to resolve them only to find paypal keeps logging them out. PayPal have responded to them saying that there “is an IT issue which has affected a few claims for a few merchants.”
As a temporary solution PayPal account managers have suggested “If you have experienced difficulties updating a particular claim then please email the PP reference number for the claim, and your response you would like to submit for that claim. We will be able to forward these details to the department who look after buyer complaints so they may update the case.”
It’s great to see the process updated it needs to work for all sellers all of the time. The technical issue appears to occur on new disputes that the buyer has upgraded to a claim since the new system as been put in place. Once the buyer upgrades the dispute to a claim some sellers have been unable to access them even to offer a return for full refund.
Disputes and claims are something that most sellers will hopefully encounter as a rarity. Most buyers will email sellers asking for help and giving the seller a chance to rectify any issues prior to opening a dispute. For the few buyers that go straight to a dispute or upgrade to a claim the new process should make life easier for sellers and also highlight buyers making an unusually high number of claims to eBay.
We’d recommend providing full contact details to buyers with messaging requesting that they contact you if there’s a problem with their purchase. A PayPal claim or even a dispute is something best avoided and hopefully you’ll never get the opportunity to see the new eBay/PayPal dispute flow.
If you’ve got any hot tips for getting buyers to contact you to resolve issues before they escalate into disputes or claims let us know in comments below.
One Response
Unfortunately with Royal mail, we find that items not received diputes are not as rare as we would like. We could not send all of our items by recorded / registered mail as it would make us uncompetitive as many are reasonably low priced. items. The previous system as was very poor we will see how these changes affect us now. It was disconcerting to see them poppping up in PP and eBay.