A recent purchase went badly wrong, with the seller who had been trading regularly for a year going from 100% feedback on the day I made the purchase to 86.5% and NARU (Not A Registered User) five days later.
I received the email from eBay’s Loss Prevention Department informing me that the listing had been removed and went to start the chargeback process from within PayPal. As the listing had disappeared from My eBay I thought PayPal was my only option, but I was given the choice to participate in eBay’s trial resolution service by telephone.
As soon as I explained that the seller was NARU they put me on hold for a minute while they checked, and instantly came back to offer an eBay funded refund. The only snag was that instead of refunding to my PayPal email address they will only send the funds to your eBay registered email.
It’s not a huge problem, it’s the work of 30 seconds to add an additional email address to a PayPal account, but as a seller I already have several attached and there’s a limit to how many you can add (seven if I recall correctly).
Overall it’s a great improvement over the PayPal chargeback process and I’d recommend any buyers offered the service take up the option of dealing with eBay rather than PayPal. In my case it was only £4.98, but knowing eBay will underwrite a transaction does nothing but add confidence in trading on the site. The one and only improvement would be for them to refund to the email address I made the original PayPal payment from rather than the one registered on my eBay account.
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