PayPal fines sellers for complaints

The digital payments platform has introduced a fee to be paid by the sellers in its terms of service if customers are right in the event of a complaint

The headquarters of PayPal (Getty Images) The digital payment giant PayPal has decided to introduce new rules to dissuade sellers from improper behavior and better protect consumers in the event of a dispute. With the update of the terms and conditions of service, from 16 December the platform has decided that it will apply a penalty to the sellers if a customer's dispute should turn into a real complaint.

In particular, the additional fee will be applied in the event that the customer does not receive the purchased goods or in the event that the product does not correspond to the one displayed and presented online. For these situations, if the dispute is closed in favor of the customer, the company has decided to apply a fixed fee of 14 euros to the seller regardless of the size of the transaction. And that figure could also rise if the seller reported a dispute rate higher than 1.5% on the last hundred transactions carried out in the previous three months.

Specifically, then, the timing of resolution of disputes also changes . Today, whoever pays with PayPal and encounters a problem with the goods received must contact the seller and, in case of no response, can report the dispute to the platform, which in turn contacts the seller and urges him to resolve the situation. If the reminder does not lead to any result after 30 days, the consumer can then decide to initiate a complaint.

With the new terms that come into effect from mid-December that time frame drops to 20 days, after which, if the customer converts his dispute into a complaint and this complaint is closed in his favor, PayPal will apply the rate 14 euros or more depending on the seller's situation.

From the platform's point of view, this is a way to encourage sellers to respond more quickly to customer complaints. Furthermore, disputes that are not converted into complaints, those resolved directly between the seller and the customer, those relating to unauthorized transactions and those relating to transactions with a value lower than double the tariff are excluded from the application of the tariff. >
The news also comes at a very favorable moment for PayPal, which in the wake of the general increase in online purchases during the first six months of the year, above all due to the Covid-19 emergency, has reached Italy over 7 million and 300 thousand active accounts and a global turnover up 20% compared to the previous year.