“Unfortunately, the refund that you sent didn’t go through” – eBay Error When Making Partial Refunds

I listed my old headphones on eBay last month and 15 days after it was delivers, the buyer contacted me saying that the headphones don’t sound as good as he expected. Then, he requested a partial refund of $20. I agreed with him and sent him the offer on eBay. However, he couldn’t receive the refund after accepting my offer.

I went to my eBay account to issue the refund manually but as soon as I clicked on the “Refund Buyer” button, the following error appeared:

“We couldn’t process your request because of a technical issue. Please try again.”

I tried again many times but ended up with the error message:

“Unfortunately, the refund that you sent didn’t go through. To get more details or try again, go To PayPal.”

I checked my Paypal account and of course, everything was working fine. My Paypal had negative balance due to the eBay dispute, so I transferred extra funds from my bank account to cover the refund. I tried sending the refund once again on eBay but still saw the same error.

The option to make partial refund directly on Paypal is also disabled due to the eBay dispute. Therefore, I had to contact eBay to find a solution, and this is their response:

I understand want to issue a partial refund to the buyer. Rest assured I’ll be helping you on this. Upon checking the claim, I understand you and the buyer agreed for partial refund. If you are having error to refund, make sure you have enough PayPal balance to cover the refund amount. Or if not, you may partially refund though PayPal then call us back with proof for refund so that we can close the request. In the event you’ll escalate and ask eBay to step in, it will be a defect on your account. I hope you can find a way to refund the buyer.

Then, they sent another message to confirm that I can make refund via Paypal:

You can still issue a partial refund even though there is a open claimed in eBay, once that the system detected the partial refund that’s the time that we can close this case.

The information is totally incorrect. The transaction is on hold on Paypal and I couldn’t do anything with it. In the transaction details, there is a line saying “Your buyer filed a dispute on this transaction. Sign in to your eBay account for more information on how to resolve it.“

Overall, this is a terrible experience. eBay told me to go to Paypal to make refund while Paypal told me to come back to eBay to resolve the case first. The eBay support was also useless as they kept providing outdated and incorrect information. They even told me that in case I couldn’t send refund to buyer, they would step it and there would be a defect on my account. I don’t care because this would be the last time I sold on eBay. They failed to protect sellers from abusive buyers and failed to make a simple partial refund.

Update 1: eBay found out the reason for the unsuccessful refund. After investigation, they told me it was because the buyer wasn’t covered by eBay Money Guarantee Program, so the refund request couldn’t go through. Then, they requested the funds to be released and it would take 24-72 hours once submitted.

Update 2: 1 month later, eBay still couldn’t release the funds and the transaction is still pending.

Update 3: After some more attempts reaching out, finally I got my funds back after 2 months.