I ordered some Japanese boosters from Ebay for around $1k a week ago. Since I am living in Europe (€), I had to pay the PayPal currency conversion fees in order to pay the seller in USD. Yesterday I received a message with a lot of apologies that all the boosters already sold out, because he had also listed them on another platform.
Now the seller wants to give me a refund. However, I am worried that the refund will be in USD, which will net me a loss, since I already paid the currency conversion fees (and have to pay them again if I want to change my currency to €). Ebay only shows the exact amount I paid to the seller (€910), while my PayPal balance was deducted with €950.
The only acceptable option for me is a full refund. Anyone knows how Ebay/PayPal deals with this ?
Do you mean you paid using paypal checkout and let paypal do the currency exchange via ebay? If you used € to pay with Paypal converting it for you, Paypal will convert the USD back into € for you but I believe at whatever the rate the USD is worth at that moment.
That’s correct, PayPal deducted it automatically from my bank account and converted it to USD after I purchased it from Ebay. My purchase history in Ebay states that I paid €910 for the boosters. PayPal deducted €950 however, so I am assuming that the difference (€40) would be the currency conversion fees. Now I am worried that I will be only refunded the amount visible in Ebay.
I don’t know how it works in this case, but I would really recommend you to use PayPal with a debit/credit card and always use the card issuer’s conversion rate when paying. This way you get a significantly better conversion rate. I’ve gotten a refund once, and everything was back on my bank account when the refund was done. In that case I actually got slightly more money from the refund than I paid due to that the US dollar had decreased in value compared to the SEK.
You will be refunded the amount visible in Ebay, but the currency will be converted again. So it won’t be ebay’s approximate € price, but the USD listed price reverted back into €. I think you will take the hit of double conversion fees though. The rule of thumb with currency conversion is to NEVER accept paypal’s awful conversion rate, and to use a Credit Card that provides free currency conversion exchange. Otherwise, you will have to pay fees. Note that a “normal” credit card still needs to pay 2.5% each time to do a currency conversion, so you must add that into the cost. Note that if the currency rate right now is favorable compared to when you purchased the item, you should be getting a giant chunk of the fees back. However, from what I remember USD is even weaker than before, so that might cost you a bit more again
Update: seller started to ignore my messages and initiated a request for cancellation, stating that I bought the item by mistake. Moreover, he has not issued any refunds … what to do now?
My guess is that the seller wants to avoid a drop in their seller performance, so they put that as an excuse. They are hoping you’ll just accept the reason and avoid themselves from getting a penalty. Tell them to create a request for cancellation properly if you want to, that states that they need to cancel because their items are out of stock. Note that you can also leave a negative feedback.
On the refund part, from what I believe, until the cancellation is confirmed, you won’t be issued a refund unless he manually does it. However, after the cancellation has been approved, the refund process should be automatic, so I would not worry about losing your money.
Yeah, definitely agree that the seller wants to avoid a penalty. I have no problems with that reason, if he would respond to my messages. With respect to the refund, Ebay states that I should only accept his cancellation request if I already received a refund or if I did not pay for the item yet. Contacted him if he can manually issue a refund, again no response. So not really sure what to do now.
Well if he doesn’t respond to your messages, you can always open a case and file a dispute against him. Ebay will naturally side with you and it’ll get the ball rolling in regards to the refund. You can explicitly mention that the cancellation is not also a ‘buyers’ mistake but that he ran out of stock.
