Paypal Will No Longer Refund Fees?

So lame.

anyone using/tried an alternative to PP?

I'm seeing significant increase in Zelle, bank transfer, and wire payments. Also notice people on the forum mentioning Transferwise more and more. All of the above are generally fee-less or low-fee, though offer no built-in buyer protection, which limits its use to just mostly well-known sellers. Watch buyers will likely insist on Paypal or F2F with individual sellers. Bottom line best I see it is that this hurts individual sellers and collectors most.

I have used Escrow.com. It seems a good alternative

Definitely crushes private sellers and collectors.

This is especially true when you add it to the eBay buyer protection program...

Now when a buyer gets cold feet and complains about something you’ve sold, you not only have to accept a return (when you offered no returns), but you get to pay 3.4% + thirty cents for his lack of good sense.

The buyer focus on eBay was already bad enough - total disregard to the sellers they profit 10% of sale pieces and shipping... Add this and I am hopeful for a new marketplace.

Already happens on Ebay. Seller pays for returns on SNAD claims (lets ignore for the moment that this is often abused by the buyer to escape paying for buyers remorse returns). So there is already a built in incentive for sellers to describe as properly as possible - you lose money if you don't, its a fact.

If you ask me, the only clear thing that the "no refunds for fees" promotes is clearly.. no returns/no refunds


Competitors like Tradesy and Poshmark are already nipping at Ebay's heels even with much larger commissions (in the 20% range), but they provide a much better experience. For example, you sell a watch on Poshmark? If it's over $500 you ship it to their facility and they will authenticate it for the buyer for free. Buyer's remorse return on Tradesy? Never happens, because if its as described they will take the return and sell it themselves. They dont send you back the return and claw back the buyer's payment

Chrono24 IMO is the best watch marketplace around. Commissions 3-5% (plus a reasonable monthly fee), and you get to talk to real people when you have an issue. In fact my support guy, Michael, I actually know who he is, what he looks like, spoke with and shook his hand several times, and have seen the watches he wears. Compare that to the robot reps on Ebay/Paypal

Returns are a big facet of commerce, especially high value goods that you don't get to inspect live before you buy them - i.e. used watches. To create friction (i.e. costs) in the return process is not good for buyer or seller. Whenever possible, costs to do a return should be minimized to keep everyone happy. Until recently I was supplying watches to a certain watch business that may be familiar to some/many (starts with the letter "T"), and was getting a crazy high return rate from them, significantly higher than the return rate from any other sales channel. This is not sustainable, I thought. And a few months later I got a letter from their lawyer. "T" had gone bankrupt, and they still owed me money for stuff they bought.

Update:

Heard this over at the e-commerce forum - due to overwhelmingly bad feedback, Paypal is not moving forward with this new policy. Fees will continue to be refunded when you return money. Good news!