Ebay refunded the cost of a lost coin (not a lot), the very next day it got delivered. Seller asked me to pay him. How would I do that? Through eBay, or just PayPal him outside of eBay? Just want to do what's right.
Did the seller refund you through eBay, or did eBay refund you directly? If it's the latter, he's got a black mark now on eBay that he (perhaps) doesn't deserve. I'm not sure how to right that, though.
I had the same thing happen to me. Sender asked that I send positive feedback to eBay and apologized for the delay. He also did not complain about a refund, he was more concerned about his standing with eBay. All well that ended well. Good luck.
Since eBay was formally involved in this, I would think the resolution should go back through eBay (for the good of the seller). I don't know how this would work; it might be a can of worms. But if you try AND eventually find an eBay procedure, letting us know how it works would be helpful to the people in here.
I had a similar issue about 5 years ago when I was living in an apartment building (was common for mail to be placed in the wrong mail boxes). I purchased a coin on Ebay, something like $500 if I remember correctly. I hadn't received the coin, so I contacted the seller and Ebay about a week or so after the package should have arrived according to tracking information. It took about a week of filing stolen property reports and so forth, but Ebay ended up fully refunding my purchase. A few days after the refund went through, I came home from work and found that the packaged coin had been slipped under my door (2+ weeks after delivery). I contacted Ebay to let them know to take back the refund, and they said, "Once a refund has been issued, we can't take it back. We only issue refunds once per customer though, so consider this to be your coverage if any future purchases go missing." Your case sounds a bit different though, as the seller was apparently charged for the cost instead of Ebay. I'm not sure how the determination is made about who is responsible for the cost. But, I would make sure that the seller was actually charged for the refund before paying them the money. There's a possibility that they might be double dipping . If the money was taken from the seller, then the Ebay policy would be to do it through them (so that they can take their cut). But, Paypaling the seller directly would probably be less headache.
The more I read about the way eBay handles packages "lost during shipment", the less I'm tempted to start selling there again.
I had the same thing happen to me as an eBay seller recently, with this fun set of delivery tracking updates: After a week of zero tracking updates, the buyer reaches out to me - I offer to refund the buyer if in two weeks after the ship date the tracking still hasn't showed any updates. Two weeks go by and I refund, then literally the next day the coin is delivered. The buyer graciously reached out to let me know, and asked how to send me payment. I suppose one option would have been to create a dummy eBay listing and have the buyer buy that. But we ended up having the buyer message me his email address and then I sent him a Paypal invoice.
