As was foretold, we've added advertisements to the forums! If you have questions, or if you encounter any bugs, please visit this thread: https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/240191/forum-advertisement-faq-and-reports-thread/
Options
Paypal and the joys of selling
precisionk
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Hoping to start selling some stuff I have online and was interested in paypal as a vendor.
Now my only thought is "How do I not get screwed as a seller?"
I keep hearing horror stories about a seller selling say something expensive on ebay and when the seller ships, the buyer refutes and the money gets taken out of the seller account and the criminal gets away with the money and item.
If anyone has experience in selling and receiving private paypal transactions, such as internet forum purchases, that would be great to know.
Now my only thought is "How do I not get screwed as a seller?"
I keep hearing horror stories about a seller selling say something expensive on ebay and when the seller ships, the buyer refutes and the money gets taken out of the seller account and the criminal gets away with the money and item.
If anyone has experience in selling and receiving private paypal transactions, such as internet forum purchases, that would be great to know.
precisionk on
0
Posts
Moral of the story, if you send the item before getting paid, I'm not sure if ebay will protect you, but if you pay first and don't get the item, you'll generally get your money back. So just make sure you recieve payment before shipping, and you should be safe.
Remember that the risks of doing business with PayPal are at least the same (if not less!) as any other merchant credit card account. If you set up an account with Visa/MC (which costs you a % of your sale) and your buyers chargeback payments, guess what, same situation. So its not a problem unique to PayPal. Your local grocery store has the same problems, except they pay a guy to fight with Visa over the signed receipt, you won't have a signed receipt, and right now I assume you can't afford to pay an employee to fight chargebacks for you. PayPal is a good option for you right now.
Long answer, read this:
https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=xpt/cps/securitycenter/sell/SellerPPOverview-outside
How does the process work if I dont go through ebay, say for example. I am selling something through craigslist and they paypal me the money. I am definitely going to wait on payment before shipping, I just want to make sure that when I do sell something that they can reverse it around AFTER they get the item I am selling.
Also, unless the buyer is trusted, do not send the item until their payment has cleared. Some methods of payment take a few days to go thru, and you can get burned if you've already sent the thing off and the payment comes back declined.
I would say you could set up ebay auctions for buyers that you are unsure of on craigslist for added protection, but recently ebay has skewed their policies to almost always favor the buyer no matter who is in the wrong.
If it's pretty expensive stuff you can escrow it, but that adds at least another $25 to the cost.
So your website will offer no less protection than an eBay purchase, if you use PayPal, it will be the same.
If you ship to their address, which must be verified with PayPal, and follow the requirements of the seller protection policy, when the buyer makes a PayPal dispute, PayPal reviews your tracking information and if delivered, denies the dispute.
If this same buyer goes to their credit card company and does a chargeback, PayPal wears the cost of it.
And get delivery confirmation.
I don't think this is a good idea. They will set your account negative and try to bill you. They will also try to use whatever funding source (or backup funding source, my primary is a bank account and my secondary is a credit card) to get their money. I'm guessing they will at the least report you to the credit bureaus.
USPS does not offer any service that affirms to what address the item was delivered to. It just says the city, state, and zip code when it is delivered. I don't know if Paypal accepts that information anyway, but normally delivery confirmation or signature confirmation are not legal proof that an item was mailed nor delivered (in the legal system, at least).
Having worked for a few months as customer support for the USPS, I would recommend you buy insurance if you value the package's contents.
With regard to USPS - I checked around and USPS Delivery confirmation is fine even though the address is not displayed, PayPal actually hooks up with USPS and offers online label printing. The DC ($0.18 at the post office I believe) is free if you use the online print system for package labels. I recommend it, I've heard a lot of good things from sellers about that product.
Obviously you still ship to the verified address only, even though the online DC won't show it in full.
If the recipient sends a written and signed documentation dated 21 days after the date of mailing that they did not receive the item, the sender can file for a claim on the insurance. We can look up insurance numbers in our system, though you can't on the website, and we can see if the item was delivered or not.
So, if delivery confirmation is fine with Paypal, go with that. Online postage is cheaper than going to the post office, too.