Bath
Quoted from o-din:Accepting paypal for an in person transaction where cash could have been placed on the glass sounds pretty stupid to me.
It's like when somebody tries to hand me a personal check for anything. "Now, how bout you going to your bank to cash it so I don't have to, then come back and see me."
This.
Also, if it were a Friends & Family payment there would be no avenue to file a dispute, as there is no Buyer Protection (PayPal's scheme) with them. See here for confirmation.
The mistake was taking PayPal at all for an in person sale, on an item that you weren't prepared to offer a warranty on if they took it away. PayPal doesn't care about your terms of business, it cares about a customer saying that the product is "significantly not as described", faulty or whatever.
Sorry you got ripped off, but you were mad to accept PayPal for a transaction like that, and arguably should not accept it period on items you're not prepared to offer returns or a warranty on (e.g. a boutique 20+ year old pinball machine)
Quoted from Manimal:Everyone needs to stop thinking of the "friends and family" part of PayPal as offering some sort of protection....THERE IS NONE.....Period. The only thing F&F does is to allow the sender to pay the percentage PayPal holds for facilitating the transaction. Outside of that, there is no difference in protections offered. The sender can still do a chargeback, they can still make a complaint, etc. End result, you can get just as screwed with F&F as with any other CC based payment.
Whilst that's true (about CC chargebacks happening outside PayPal), this wasn't a F&F payment because if it was the buyer wouldn't have been able to file a dispute through PayPal themselves. F&F would technically be a valid way of paying for a pinball machine (CC reversals notwithstanding), but accepting actual "Item I sold" purchases through PayPal, for a used pinball machine, is just nuts. A buyer could file a dispute saying that a major mech is non-functional, and PayPal will not give the slightest crap about how easy it might be to fix, they don't care about the nuances of the item that was sold, as far as they're concerned their customer - the buyer - bought a faulty item.
