A Note on PayPal Transactions: Protect Your Future Sales and Purchases

TL;DR: To both buyers and sellers - please complete transactions through PayPal via Goods & Services!

Hello, r/VinylCollectors - time to talk about protecting yourself during a transaction. Reddit is most definitely not set up or intended to be a marketplace. However, there are several advantages to purchasing on Vinyl Collectors - including the forum setting, competitive prices, and unique opportunities. It's also a great place to sell, because there are no overhead prices. Reddit isn't banking on your deals!

It's ultimately up to you how you'll pay for an item - but I urge you all to use Goods & Services when performing a transaction via PayPal. This is the easiest way to protect your purchases. If there is ever an issue, you can easily file a report with PayPal and receive a refund. If you pay via Friends & Family, you'll have an uphill (though potentially successful) battle taking care of any unpleasant situations. I had implemented the user feedback system based on user requests when I began moderating and believe while useful, it primarily shows who the most active users on the sub are. This is a good feature - but I'd still caution against any less-protected payment method even with a seller who has 10,000 Feedback Points.

To give you a transparent sense of what can be done for fraud on our site - the best we can do directly if you've paid via F&F is to contact Reddit admins and provide the username for the scamming user. We'll then follow up with you privately in order to ensure no further incidents can occur with this user in the future. From here, we can discuss how to contact PayPal if you decide to take any serious actions (see below). Reddit admins will be notified if this user ever returns with another username, which would result in a permanent Reddit ban action on their end. Bottom line: use Goods & Services.

Also, a serious note to sellers who accept payments via Friends & Family or attempt to push the Goods & Services fee to the buyer - you are not permitted to force a buyer to pay for the fees through this method and I also highly urge you not to do so. There are fines associated with accepting payments for goods via Friends & Family and it is considered "Fraudulent Use of Service". This can potentially result in a fine penalty and/or serious limitations on your accounts. So for certain, that extra ~2-3 dollars isn't worth avoiding in the long run for a safe and secure transaction. As a seller, it's also in your best interest to save tracking numbers. This is the only way you'll protect yourself against buyers saying they never received their items.

Please feel free to follow up with any other questions or comments - cheers!

A useful tip from u/kamhikamhi is to use the Fee Calculator for checking PayPal fees on G&S.