How (un)safe are you actually shopping online with PayPal?
Last few articles we are focused on online shopping experiences and thats why we are bringing you this article too. You probably assume ot are almost sure that PayPal protects you when shopping online but you might be quite surprised.
With recent banggood purchase that arrived faulty we learned quite a lot about PayPal T&C and their current Customer Support during Covid-19 crisis. The way PayPal works is that in case of dispute they contact seller and try to negotiate refund but this negotiation is quite limited and we got feeling we are communicating wit artificial intelligence instead of communicating with real agents. Most of messages were just copy/paste style where we exchanged over 50 emails and messages in 30 day period till dispute deadline expired.
Short description of communication:
Us: We received faulty item
PayPal: Seller agreed to full refund after you ship product to China
Us: Shipping to china is too expensive. We bought in from EU warehouse.
PayPal: You can apply for PayPal shipping refund
Us: After checking T&C we see you have £30 cap on shipping refund. Shipping for item to China is €500. By banggood DOA policy we have right for refund within 7 days and by EU consumers rights we have 14 cool-off period. Since product is bought from EU it should be covered by EU laws and we should get full refund including shipping if seller didn’t inform us that we need to pay shipping.
PayPal: If you buy locally and product is faulty you don’t get refund for petrol. When I personally need to return item I don’t expect for petrol or shipping to be paid to me.
Us: I think we aren’t here having a chat about about personal opinions. We should be discussing consumers rights and protection. This is false advertisement and misleading consumer. Shipping should be covered.
PayPal: You can apply for PayPal shipping refund.
Us: PayPal shipping refund has £30 cap
And it was all over again for 30 days till last day of dispute period. Couple of hours before dispute was closed we got message that we can actually send item to China, pay full shipping and then apply for full refund from PayPal. 30 days of wasted time with PayPal. We know that most people work from home and its hard to work from home but still all people that used to work in office work from home now and are expected to do their full shifts. Covid-19 shouldn’t be excuse for bad service. So far we dont know that PayPal let off any of their staff members from customer support department.
We don’t look into how sellers advertise their listings
PayPal on question about misleading consumers and false advertising
Is shopping with PayPal safe?
Well we don’t see PayPal as any better or easier option for solving problems than your local bank so we don’t see reason why would we use their service since they charge 2.9% of every transaction from sellers but don’t offer anything for that. When we used PayPal on our webshop PayPal would hold our money up to 3 weeks in case of dispute. We weren’t happy since our stock is sold but we aren’t receiving money to get new stock in and we ended up without any stock for a while. But on bright side we thought its for consumers safety. Now we see there is actually no safety at all and in one of the messages we receiver PayPal agent said they don’t look into how seller advertises listings. recently we were talking about this issues with loads of consumers and it looks like your local bank backcharge solution is better than PayPal. In loads of cases when PayPal took sellers side dispute was finally solved by Bank that took consumers side. Seems like PayPal doesn’t look at the whole situation and they just blindly follow their guidelines. bank backcharge takes longer but its usually solved in consumers favour. If we are wrong in any way or we were wrongly informed by their customer support agents PayPal can contact us and we will be happy to change article.
How to easily fraud consumers with PayPal help?
Register Chinese address for returns with PayPal and sell products in EU. And as long you’re doing it that way you can sell crap or 100% faulty products and PayPal will protect you. EU commission should have a better look into this. We will sure send them email.
