The PayPal payment service is very popular in Germany. However, the provider is now discontinuing a useful free service for its customers.
PayPal acts as an intermediary payment service when shopping online. If you have an account with the provider, you can connect it to your bank account and pay quickly and securely in most online shops. In addition, it was previously possible via PayPal to send returns free of charge to a certain extent via the service. That’s over now. The free service has been discontinued without replacement since Sunday, November 27th.
No more free returns via PayPal
“Starting November 27, 2022, PayPal will no longer accept refund requests for return shipping costs. Please ensure you submit all eligible requests before the above date so that they can be received and reviewed as usual.”
This notice has been on the relevant PayPal page for a few weeks. Until November 27th, it was possible to send back clothing that didn’t fit to the seller free of charge if the original purchase was also paid for via PayPal. The service was also capped at 12 times 25 euros per year. However, this corresponds to a saving of 300 euros if you have fully exhausted the free returns offer.
Why is PayPal stopping returns?
PayPal does not give a specific reason for the abolition of the service. Of official site It just says, “At PayPal, we’re constantly updating and developing new features for our customers. Sometimes certain services need to be discontinued as part of these larger changes.”
The most likely thing is that returns have become too big a cost factor for PayPal. For this reason, other big names such as Zara and Uniqlo have already discontinued the corresponding service. One of the reasons for this is that the price per return is significantly higher than it appears at first glance. In addition to postage for the return, there are often processing and reprocessing costs for the goods. This would only affect PayPal as an intermediate payment service to a limited extent, but the free returns seem to be too expensive for the US company.
Critics of free returns should be happy about that. It has long been pointed out that such services fuel CO2 consumption and produce an unnecessarily large amount of waste. In some cases, returned goods even have to be destroyed for legal and hygienic reasons. In some cases, however, it could also become uncomfortable for customers, for example if goods arrive at home damaged, they have to be sent back for buyer protection to take effect. Especially with shipments from abroad, the return costs are likely to be higher than the actual value of the goods, so that it is not worth returning at your own expense.