@greenmangoes wrote:
Can you clarify this a bit more... sorry I don't quite get it.
Because I was about to issue a refund of 100%, are you saying that will give me a defect?
There are three separate situations to watch for in terms of defects:
#1) A scenario like the OP's, where the buyer purchases items individually and pays full shipping on each, and the seller wants to refund the buyer for excess shipping paid (incidentally, I think this is still happening to a lot of us because U.S. buyers can't properly use the cart -- see the most recent Wed. board discussion with the eBay.ca staff -- they are "working on it').
In this case, you want to make sure that the amount of shipping you refund doesn't equal any one item total, or it will be seen by eBay as a full refund "without cause" (i.e. seller's, not buyer's, error).
So what you do is spread the shipping reimbursements around more or less evenly to avoid creating a full refund on any one transaction, even if this does mean the slight hassle of having to open each separate Paypal transaction and refund a portion only, until the total refunds equal the total amount of excess shipping you want to give back to the buyer.
Now, obviously, you're not going to get your eBay FVFs back on the shipping amount that you're refunding -- this is a sore spot for sellers that eBay has never addressed -- but usually it's a fairly small amount. Some sellers actually reduce the amount of the refund by the amount of FVFs paid on the refund, but I don't usually do that, out of courtesy for my buyer, or unless it's a significant amount. I once had to refund over $45 in shipping to a European purchaser, and in that case I did deduct the 9% FVFs before refunding.
#2) A situation where a buyer has made a mistake in purchasing something and wants to cancel the transaction (now buyers can do this within 1 hour of purchase!), and/or both parties agree to cancel because of buyer error of some kind. In this case, you can issue a full refund (if the buyer has already paid), but you must make sure you follow through with the cancellation, using an "acceptable" reason (i.e. not that you were out of stock or sold the item(s) to another buyer -- those two reasons are eBay no-no's).
#3) As noted above, a full refund because of seller error will get you a defect regardless of how nice you are to your customer. Because of this, eBay now considers a full refund to be an automatic defect unless there is a cancellation for the right reason, so it's important to avoid a full refund unless the buyer has requested a cancellation of the transaction.
Mostly, as the OP says, this problem occurs when buyers make a significant overpayment in shipping on multiple items of relatively low value. Obviously if you're selling individual items, each of which has a value higher than the total shipping refund, you can do the refund on one of those items. In that case, I usually pick the highest-priced item on which to process the refund. For example, if you need to make a $30 total refund and you have one item that's sold for $50 (not including shipping), then you should be OK as it will be shown as only a partial refund on that transaction.
Still, it's generally best to spread the refund around -- you'll need a pencil and paper (or calculator) to keep track of the running total as you do each refund through Paypal.
Not a simple (or logical) process by any means is it? But this is the workaround eBay has forced us sellers to do to avoid unfair defects. If and when the long-promised cart fix is ever done between .com and .ca, hopefully we won't have this problem anymore!
