I've been using Paypal for many years, and for the last few years have been able to use their Pay After Delivery facility, where they pay the seller and don't bill you for 2 weeks, which is usually enough time for the item to get to you and you to decide if it's any good or not. This saves a lot of hassle when trying to claim refunds for stuff from eBay for example when the seller sends you a wrong item or a lamp arrives broken etc.

However for the past week or so it's not been available as an option when checking out on eBay, which is one of the few situations where I tend to use Paypal these days. It's a Paypal facility not an eBay one, so I tried to contact them, of course there's no way to do it by phone, you have to use their so-called live chat system which is useless, somebody takes three hours or so at least to reply to a typed line of text, and all I get is the stock reply "if Pay after Delivery isn't offered as an option then the seller doesn't support it" or some such thing. Well why did they support it one day and not the next..? For similar items and from a seller I've bought from before where it worked perfectly well three weeks ago..?  

I am not a happy bunny right now, has anyone else had this problem and have you had the same (lack of) response that I've had..? Or have you actually managed to get some sense out of them..?

Oh yes, if anyone has a working UK phone number from Paypal (preferably one where I don't spend an hour pressing buttons) then I'd really love to hear from you..!

It might be due to the pandemic. The postal system is really bogged down by physical distancing measures and a sharp increase in online shopping from people stuck at home bored, so delivery times are doubled and it would make sense that paypal or sellers discontinued offering this feature to prevent customers pulling their funds back because of issues beyond a sellers control.

Possibly, but whatever the reason, would it have been that hard to send an email out to customers telling them they were doing this..? Or put a message up on the front page of their website..?

And why were the so-called "customer service" department blissfully unaware of it..? If they'd known, they could have told me instead of trotting out the stock reply from their script.

I'm still mad  

They just like Pitney Bowes ( the Global Shipping Program) Like to make themselves very inaccessible when it comes to customer service. It can be frustrating for sure

An update on this. I recently bought a couple of items direct from someone's website, i.e. not via eBay. The pay after delivery option worked fine, but when I bought stuff before (from the same seller, incidentally) it didn't work at all, so that indicates to me it's an eBay problem. Querying eBay on this produced the answer that pay after delivery has to be agreed direct with the seller. CRAP, it doesn't. Or otherwise why would I have had the option on every eBay purchase I've made for years, then for some reason it stopped..?

Paypal say it's eBay, eBay say it's not them, so basically I'm stuffed. Not impressed