Press Release Summary = READERS of the Daily Mail and This is Money are furious with eBay payment system PayPal. Two weeks ago we highlighted serious flaws with Paypal. Since then we have been flooded with complaints from buyers and sellers whose transactions have gone wrong and are at their wit\'s end trying to get their money back.
Press Release Body = MILLIONS of us are buying and selling goods on eBay. Almost 70,000 eBay sellers in the UK make a quarter of their income from the online auction house.
Most transactions on eBay are made through the preferred method of payment, PayPal, the company bought by eBay for £83m in 2002. There are more than 10m accounts in the UK alone and in the last four months of 2005 it made a profit of £173m.
To use it, you set up an account with PayPal online, entering your name, address and bank or credit card details. When you buy on eBay, you transfer funds into your PayPal account and it passes the money on to the seller.
The service is free for buyers, but PayPal takes commission of 20p plus 3.4% of the sale price of anything up to £1,500 from the seller. Sellers claim the system is biased towards buyers and they end up out of pocket when things go wrong.
What protection do you get?
THE laws covering items bought on eBay are different from those covering online or High Street sales. The Sale of Goods Act and Distance Selling Regulations do not include auctions, which is what eBay is.
EBay and PayPal both offer a complaints system, though they do encourage you to try to resolve any problems directly first. EBay says it will give you £150 back if it can be proved you did not receive the goods you bought.
PayPal will cover you for up to £500 if the order was covered by the PayPal buyer protection shield, a little logo that appears next to the bidding price of the items on sale.
PayPal is regulated by City watchdog Financial Services Authority, which means that consumers have the back-up of the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) if they have a complaint about the service.
The FOS says it has only had 57 complaints last year about electronic transfer companies, of which PayPal is the largest, and most of these were about maladministration. But this low number may be because it cannot adjudicate on many of the problems PayPal customers say they are having and because consumers do not know they can turn to the regulator for help.
The complaints we have received fall into a few specific categories.
Complaint One
THE seller sends off the item after the money from the buyer appears in their PayPal account. The buyer receives it, but does not sign the postal receipt and then complains to PayPal that the item is either faulty or has not been received.
PayPal sends the money back to the buyer, leaving the seller out of pocket. If the seller has already taken the money out of their PayPal account then their account is placed in arrears and PayPal begins court action and threatens debt collectors until the money is repaid.
Web Site = http://www.paypal.com/us/mrb/pal
Contact Details = antonio hicks 516 east winter greenville , 62246 $$country
2025
