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Comment by joshcrowder | Hacker News Reader

Requesting a refund is different from a charge-back via PayPal. Working with any contractor be it an agency or a freelancer there is always a risk you wont be happy.

The correct way of dealing with it is to find an agreement you can both deal with. Not use shitty Paypal tactics to reverse the charge.

If you go for dinner and don't enjoy the food, you do not pay, leave and then call Amex and tell them your card was stolen.

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> Requesting a refund is different from a charge-back via PayPal.

Anytime Paypal's involved, the waters are so muddled who can say what happened? To even be entitled to a refund, the person has a limited amount of time to file a complaint.

If the complaint is filed, Paypal may do the chargeback all by itself, even if this isn't specifically what the complainant intended.

Paypal nearly always sides with the buyer. If it's a service, even more so.

My limited experience of disputing a PayPal transaction was exactly the opposite (i.e. I was the buyer).

My extensive experience of being a PayPal seller is quite the contrary. People request a charge back, PayPal "encourages" them to contact you, which essentially is just an extra step in the charge back process that they can skip, then nearly every time the money is returned with nothing the seller can do about it.

Afaict it depends on the kind of transaction. For services PayPal is very buyer-friendly. The main area in which I've consistently heard of buyers unhappy that PayPal sides with the seller is with purchases of physical items. It seems like PayPal accepts any kind of proof-of-shipment as conclusive in those cases. If the seller can show a tracking code with proof of delivery, PayPal closes the dispute in favor of the seller. This ends up making it easy for sellers to ship severely subpar goods (e.g. relabeling used things as new), and even carry out outright scams like shipping an empty box full of packing peanuts, or shipping a cheap compact camera to fulfill a high-end sale.

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