Paypal has an integrated shipping label creation service powered by Shipstation. I recently bought some shipping labels, with my shipstation account set to charge my Paypal account balance. However Paypal incorrectly charged my bank instead. This sent that bank account negative, causing my bank to charge me $350 in overdraft fees.
Contacting Paypal, I explained the error and sent them a screenshot of my payment settings. They ignored the screenshot, falsely told me that I had set it to draw from my bank account, and closed the chat without permitting a response from me.
If I follow the dispute steps laid out in Yassine Meskhout's excellent article on the subject, will I be successful in recovering my money?
(Resolves on vibes, based on whether it feels more like a success than a failure. For example, if they issue me a courtesy $5 coupon and nothing else, that counts as a loss. If they send me the $350 back but I had to pay $50 in expenses related to the dispute, that counts as a win.)
Update 2024-20-12 (PST): If I do not roughly follow the dispute process outlined in the article, the market will resolve as N/A. (AI summary of creator comment)
Update 2024-30-12 (PST): - If Paypal pays for arbitration costs, it counts as a success. (AI summary of creator comment)
1,000
3.00@DanHomerick Anything that doesn't involve me roughly following the process suggested in the article results in this resolving N/A.
You could try asking your bank to waive the fees - it's not your bank's fault, but banks are often willing to waive fees in circumstances like this.
@IsaacKing if PayPal reimbursed you $210, that'd resolve YES, then?
I absolutely think you should go ahead with the arbitration request, but I think it's going to hinge on you being able to show that the contested payment really wasn't supposed to go to your bank. The screenshot sounds good, but I assume you took it after the problem, not before.
Paypal's system had some reason to process the payment the way they did. It could be a bug, it could also be some payment processing rule they have which you weren't aware of, but which is surely documented somewhere. If it's due to a bug -- even a "known" bug -- I expect that the disputes team won't have a clue about its existence.
So you should expect that paypal thinks they processed it correctly. They'll surely be willing to pay some amount for the problem to just go away and to keep the customer happy, regardless. $350 may be above that threshold though, especially if you're not doing $10K+/year of transactions through them (made up number, btw).
... I think you can get the money, but officially opening the arbitration case will be critical. I don't think they're going to give you more than like $50 without it.
@DanHomerick Yeah, that's my main concern. I'm reasonably confident that it is a problem on their end, but my only evidence is a screenshot that I could have altered afterwards. I'm hoping that the arbitration process allows some form of discovery, in which I could ask Paypal/Shipstation to check their logs and see if I made any changes to my payment settings since then.
I do significantly more than $10k in yearly transactions, but most of those are "friends and family", meaning Paypal doesn't get any fee from them, so I'm probably not a priority customer.
I do suspect that giving out money is something Paypal will be more loathe to do than just reinstating an account, since such a policy would be much more easily abused by bad actors willing to spam arbitration requests.
Sending me $210 would resolve this YES, yeah.