Have to pay for customer's incorrect address

[krivak.2007]

Well this is a new one  - for me anyway... I was just required to pay a reimbursement for an item that was sent with exactly the address that was in the Paypal account.  Here is how it went:

The customer claimed that he had not received the item. He started a case without talking to me first

I checked the information about how it was sent etc. and discovered that the customer had put his email address in where his house number and street address should go in his mailing address. His actual address was in the next line. It was sent airmail which has no active tracking (tracked service to his country would be 40+ dollars for a 18 dollar item).

Pointed this out to the customer - who said he had never had a problem before and he wanted a refund.

Decided to let E-Bay decide this one but they decided on the customer's side.

My only conclusion is that the customer is always right - even in a case where they are patently at fault. Apparently a customer can put anything they want for their address and be assured that they will get their money back. 

I am interested if this item is returned to me. The post office could quite rightly say that this was an incorrect address. 

Anyone else had an experience like this?

[recped]

Having an email address on the second line with the street address on the third line should have no effect at all on delivery. It's not even that unusual if it was going to Asia where buyers often put their mobile phone number on line 2.

Which country was it sent to and how long had it been in transit?

[pjcdn2005]

It’s rarely a good idea to let eBay decide as new you have an unresolved claim defect.  If there is no delivery confirmation than the customer is going to win an INR.  I doubt that the email address made a huge difference anyway,

[krivak.2007]

It was going to Australia.

[femmefan1946]

It wasn't the strange address, carriers are literate and can usually decode the oddest directions.

It was the lack of tracking.

Canadian sellers have to find a balance between a shipping cost that will be acceptable to our customers and the necessity of tracking.

For the rest - Cookie Jar Insurance.

Adding a few pennies to every listing to offset the cost of the occasional problem, not all of them caused by others.

[lotzofuniquegoodies]

Because of the volume a postal system handles they really do not have time to do much digging if they feel there is an issue with a delivery address. As a seller, it's your responsibility to check the address for any, what could be potential issues with final delivery. If you have questions, you can always email to confirm. As a backup, it never hurts to print out the address labels that are available in the orders drop-down menu to apply to your package in case your shipping label falls off or is removed during customs inspection process for international shipments. They are processing thousands of packages daily and very easy for the documents and packages to get separated. As you applied these labels there is a good chance you would have noticed any irregularities with an address. It's also a good idea, especially when mailing internationally to do a google check of the address to confirm it is correct. (Another consideration is that eBay's address format and a countries format for a delivery address are not always the same. This too can be googled for a manually created address label.) You can get labels and the post office counter for free or just purchase from any dollar store. More than likely the addition of the email address was done when they first set up the account and it was never fixed. As a rule, a postal system will very rarely contact the address by email, but if it was required it's available with their scan of the package if it was included in the normal field.

-Lotz

PS. On a side note it would acutally be much better if there was a valid phone number on the package vs an email address, in the case there were any issues before delivery.

[tryubik-useonlyasdirected]

A package was once held for over 30 days in Australian customs; luckily we had tracked and insured.

The buyer was patient and waited their customs out and received their order with an annoying but occasionally inevitable delay. There was no notice just a package gone AWOL for weeks. It took a little sleuthing to find it stuck in limbo.

Sometimes if tracking doesn't show in the USPS service it will show in the post of the destination Country. If tracking was offered in the purchase it will show somewhere. (This is true of France, possibly Australia.)

[ichopshop]

As someone pointed out it was the lack of tracking that sunk you.  If you can't show delivery (or attempted delivery) ebay will decide for the customer every time.  As other's have also pointed out, it's best to not let ebay just decide.  Calling them can help greatly if you're not sure where you stand.

I recently had something not too dissimilar happen.  I shipped an item to the address the customer provided.  Turns out the address was invalid/incomplete in some fashion (even though it looked fine) and the item was returned.  The buyer also confirmed he had entered the wrong address.  As it was a heavier item and I shipped it Parcel Select, the return shipping costs are not included with the purchase of the label as it is with Priority Mail.  In other words, I was on the hook for a shipping charge that was not much less than my cost for the item.  I called ebay to ask how I should proceed.  They told me as I'd shipped the item to the address provided by the customer and I could prove that through my label purchase/tracking number they told me I'd met my obligations and that if the buyer opened an INR just to call them back and they'd close it in my favour.  I refused the parcel at the Post Office and it went off to dead mail.

Ian

[femmefan1946]

Mail is mostly handled by machinery.

After Canada Post tossed your shipment into the Australia bin, it went onto a plane.

After landing in Australia, the postal code read by a machine, took it to the right state, then town, then postal walk.
Then the carrier actually read the alphanumeric address, ignored the email as irrelevant, and brought it to your customer's mailbox.

Or possibly not.

Maybe it was captured by drop bears. Or eaten by spiders.

@ichopshop 

An option on shipments that were returned for incorrect address, which the buyer is unwilling to pay again for shipment, is to refund the buyer the selling price, minus the cost of shipping both ways.

This is more difficult when we use Free Shipping, where the cost of shipping is part of the selling price.

[tryubik-useonlyasdirected]

@femmefan1946

"Or possibly not. Maybe it was captured by drop bears. Or eaten by spiders."

Thanks for the smiles, it certainly feels like that at times.

[krivak.2007]

We could go sci-fi: Vortex of Doom, Black hole of despair, Wormhole of no return... wait a minute... am I talking about parcels of my kid's unmatched socks?

[pocomocomputing]

Off topic.

Socks that go into the laundry in pairs and one of the pair disappears are transformed in the dryer to plastic or metal store clothes hangers that appear out on nowhere in your clothes closets. Trying to reverse the process by putting the hangars in the dryer to transform the hangar back to socks does not work. Very noisy to try this with tumbling the hangars in the dryer.

I got the above information from a very reliable source, the Internet, years ago.

[femmefan1946]

@pocomocomputing 

As usual the internet is misinformed.

The actual life cycle of the coat hanger was carefully explained in the award-winning article titled Or All The Seas With Oysters by that seminal thinker the late Avram Davidson (1923-1993).

At its most basic, the cycle starts with the safety pin, which then pupates as a coat hanger, until the few survivors spring to their glory as bicycles.

This can be proven even by those less scholarly than Dr. Davidson, when we note that bicycles are one of the few "machines" which come in two sexes.

Personally, however, I have from time to time lain awake remembering that the Wright Brothers owned a bicycle shop.

[tryubik-useonlyasdirected]

Not to post off-topic but ... if only mail parcels had a similar system:

@femmefan1946  thanks for the scifi tip, added it to 'the list of things to read before bedtime this evening.'

[electronicifycanada]

Actually according to eBay policy. If a buyer doesn't use the proper address on PayPal then they automatically lose buyer protection. The thing is the buyer needs to admit that and you also will need to really cite that to a rep at eBay.

I have had this happen 3 times in 2018. Most of my packages are sent lettermail and every time I won the case. 1 time I did have a difficulty but I just called back when they didn't do it and they overturned it eventually.

[tryubik-useonlyasdirected]

You send it to the PayPal address? I always thought it must be sent to the address on the eBay Order Details? (PP is the Billing address and eBay is the Shipping address)

[krivak.2007]

In theory - and in most cases reality - the address in Paypal and on the E-Bay shipping details page are derived from the other. Paypal will not cover anything not sent to the address listed with their account. Paypal and E_bay used to be part of the same company up until a few years ago which made the general rule much easier to manage.  Its a bit more muddled than before...

Still can't find those matching socks... have to check the Hyper Space Drive unit...

[recped]

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@tryubik-useonlyasdirected wrote:

You send it to the PayPal address? I always thought it must be sent to the address on the eBay Order Details? (PP is the Billing address and eBay is the Shipping address)

---

Let's clarify....

When a buyer purchases but before they pay the address provided by eBay is the Default Shipping Address the buyer used in their eBay profile.

When a buyer pays via PayPal they can change the address to something else, alternate, gift, whatever. That address will be sent back to eBay and will replace if necessary the one that showed initially.

The direction to use the PayPal shipping address ONLY is to prevent sellers using the initial shipping address shown on eBay which may no longer be correct and does not match the PayPal address.

The risk of using the eBay initial address is twofold, it may not be where the buyer wants the package sent and it eliminates PayPal INR protection for the seller because the payment address was not used.

We sometimes hear that buyers claim "you sent it to my old address" because they have never updated their eBay profile (since the PayPal one is the only one that matters).

This comes into play when sellers prints a shipping label prior to payment or if there is any temporary glitch in the transfer of info from PayPal to eBay.

Simple solution to avoid issues....always use the PayPal address.

On my own buying account I rarely use the eBay shipping address, I have several shipping addresses in PayPal which I use depending on the situation, only one of them matches the eBay address. Generally speaking I use a US address(mail drop) when buying from US Sellers and my Canadian address for overseas purchases.

[pjcdn2005]

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@electronicifycanada wrote:

Actually according to eBay policy. If a buyer doesn't use the proper address on PayPal then they automatically lose buyer protection. The thing is the buyer needs to admit that and you also will need to really cite that to a rep at eBay.

I have had this happen 3 times in 2018. Most of my packages are sent lettermail and every time I won the case. 1 time I did have a difficulty but I just called back when they didn't do it and they overturned it eventually.

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That's incorrect. The buyer can use any address they chose to, it doesn't have to the registered address on Paypal or on ebay. They can add the address at the time of payment. The seller is the one who may be penalized if they do not sent it to the payment address.  The onus is on them   to prove that the item was received at the payment address and if they can't prove that, they have to refund the buyer if an item not received case is open on ebay or Paypal.  Since I don't know all of the details of your situations I can't really comment but it is definitely incorrect that a buyer must use a specific address.