Since many of you use PayPal and/or accept PayPal payments, I thought I'd relate my recent experience with them from a buyer's perspective.

I used Buy-it-now to purchase an item (not a chip nor was it casino-related) on eBay on about August 12th. I paid $20 for the item and an additional $7.50 shipping. I didn't even consider purchasing insurance for it even though the sellers description said to ask them to add it to the invoice if I wanted it.

After a couple of weeks, the item still had not shown up, so I contacted the seller. The told me they had mailed it a couple of days after I paid and gave me a USPS tracking number. Checking the number at the USPS site shows it was entered into their system on August 14th, but had a disclaimer to the effect that "just because the number was entered into our system doesn't mean we received the item to be shipped".

I took this to mean that the seller might have printed a shipping label with the number from their computer instead of having the number entered into the system by a postal clerk. Which also made me think that maybe the seller made an error and didn't actually get the package mailed to me.

The item never arrived. I contacted the seller again and they refused a refund, saying I should have purchased insurance. They said they contacted the post office but there was nothing they could do since it was uninsured.

Finally, I filed a dispute with PayPal. The seller escalated the dispute to a claim. PayPal took about a month to review my case and just today refunded my full purchase price and amount paid for shipping (because the seller did still have that much in their account--had they not, PayPal would try to collect it in the future).

So, in this case, PayPal did side with the purchaser, even though insurance was offered in the item description and not taken. Although as the purchaser I'm glad they did in my case, this could just as easily happen to me as a seller. Although I never buy insurance on small items I purchase, I almost always buy it on larger items that I sell.