Here's something that I hope most of you won't have to care about. I "won" a couple of sketchy eBay auctions last month, and to nobody's great surprise, they didn't work out. I opened cases, eBay decided in my favor, and yesterday I got the emails telling me to check my PayPal balance for my refunds. Just one catch: I didn't actually pay with PayPal, although it wasn't exactly intentional. As part of the recent eBay/PayPal divorce, eBay has started offering credit-card payment as a separate selection. Previously, I'd sign in to pay via PayPal, then select my credit card as the payment method. This was fine, except that if I had a PayPal balance, that would always get used first, with no option to leave it. This time, I was able to select credit-card payment instead of PayPal payment. I gave my card details, and the transaction went through. I get my full credit-card points, and full fraud protection from the card (as a backstop behind eBay's Buyer Protection). I sort of fuzzily assumed at the time that PayPal was still somehow involved, but in retrospect, that clearly wasn't true. Apparently, this change hasn't propagated through to eBay's refund notification boilerplate, which still says: There's no refund on my PayPal balance, and never will be, of course. Unfortunately, there's also no refund on my credit card balance yet. I called eBay customer service tonight, and was told that it'll take up to 7 business days to process the refund through "Visa" (not actually the card I used, but I won't waste time fussing about the script the CSRs have to read from). That's a good bit longer than I'm used to, but I can tolerate it. I'll MOST CERTAINLY be paying close attention to make sure that it comes through, though. So, bottom line: 1. You can now easily skip PayPal when selecting a payment method for an auction (or at least a BIN). No idea how this affects the fees the seller sees. 2. If you do that, and you have to get a Buyer Protection refund, be prepared to wait considerably longer to get your money back.
To me, seven business days is not a long wait. I have seen two and three weeks for processing many times. Not through eBay but through retail merchants and my credit cards.
Well, technically, it's more like 15 business days. You have to give 4 days to "ship," followed by 4 days to "respond," then finally after eBay says you're right, this new 7 day hold.
More than that -- 10 days to wait for the package that was clearly never going to arrive, 3-4 days to wait for a response from the seller, then up to several days to wait for a decision from eBay. I "bought" on the 17th, recognized definite fraud on the 25th, filed on the 27th, received my favorable ruling on the 2nd, and have to wait until perhaps the 11th for my refund. I can only entertain the notion of bidding on questionable auctions if I'm confident that I can afford to wait for the refund. I can, but the longer the expected wait, the less inclined I am to bother bidding (gambling) in the first place. Not sure whether eBay would consider that a good or a bad thing; heck, I'm not sure whether I consider it a good or a bad thing.
