Sean's blog

Paypal: Your refund must not exceed your available balance

You have to love Paypal because it always just works. Well, always except for those times when it doesn’t. And then you have to ‘Contact Us’. And then it’s abysmally bad. A Lolyco customer changed their mind subsequent to paying for an order, but prior to shipping. No problem! We can just remove the unwanted articles, and refund the money for those items.

So you would think. The customer paid in Australian Dollars. Lolyco’s Paypal account is in British Pounds. When we tried to issue a partial refund we got the message:

Your refund must not exceed your available balance. If you have funds in another currency balance, you may want to consider transferring funds from other currency balances.

And no ‘issue refund’ button! The account had substantially more in it than was needed to repay our customer, so we ‘Contact Us’d Paypal. FOUR TIMES. FOUR USELESS REPLIES. We tried phoning too. But this is Malaysia, so that didn’t work. The phone just hung up with a useless click each time. Not a problem, that’s normal for Malaysia.

What’s really annoying is that the error message is longer than the solution to the problem. It didn’t take long to find the answer on Google – it seems it’s a fairly common problem. I found it first on Ian Ozsvald’s blog. Here’s the useful bit that the error message and Paypal’s ‘support’ droids omit:

go to Profile, select Currency Balances

How difficult is that? 6 words? The problem is having insufficient funds in the refund currency, so you have to set up a currency balance and transfer some money to it. That’s not really the problem, it’s Paypal not offering to do an automatic currency conversion back. Why is that? It seems unlikely we’ll ever know why the refund process is so lame, given that it’s not even possible to get Paypal’s support to answer a simple question.

Thanks for reading. I feel better now.