Canceled Order/Sale - Does not show refund amount in Sold Item List

[ChetK]

Hi
I had to cancel an order due to a typo in my listing that was my error. Postage was never ordered, I simply informed my customer of the typo on my listing, and agreed I would cancel the order and issue a refund. That was this weekend, and ebay initiated the refund via paypal to the customer. However the refund amount does not appear in Sold Items sheet after I did a recent Sold Item download.

1. I then tried to set the Call Duration in settings to 30 days and redid Sold Items download. No luck.
2. On Sold Items page, I deleted the entire row with the item, leaving no blank row. I then set Call Duration to 30 days and did another SI download. I got a reply of No New Sales, and no row appeared for the item, neither the sale showing no refund or an item showing a refund.

It appears if a seller cancels an item due to an issue of their making, it is no longer included in the SI download thus why refund never updated, nor when doing a re-download of the deleted item.

Have you seen this before or know if there is a solution to get the refund to populate?

Since Paypal no longer refunds merchant fees, there is still an expense to the seller and I wish to reflect it in my numbers. So I see two problems.
1. If a seller does an SI download before cancelling they will see the item in the SI List, but will not get a refund amount once a cancelation is done. (This was my case)
2. If a seller does a cancellation prior to doing SI download, the item will never appear in the SI List.

Scenario 1 at least I can manually go and enter the refund amount given to the buyer.
Scenario 2 means having to go through the fun steps of manually entering a sale, and special steps entering UNIQUE numbers.

Do you know if this is know issue, or is there a solution or work around?
Also it is possible I did something wrong which makes my observations null.

Thank you
Chet

[Scott]

Hi, no, you did everything correctly.
Unfortunately, that is how the eBay API call handles cancellations... it just gets rid of them.
If an item is refunded, it can then download the refund fee as expected, but for some reason they handle cancellations differently.

You have a few options to manually enter the fee:
As you noted the easiest is if you already downloaded it, you can type in the refund amount and check over the fee information to make sure it is correct.

If you want a simpler way, you could put the total amount lost in a single entry into the expense tab "unrecoverable fees" etc. so you wouldnt have to create a manual entry into the sold item tab.

I hope that helps explain what was going on there, let me know if I can be of further assistance.