Thread by @Scott_Helme

I bought a phone from a large retailer here in the UK and they shipped a faulty unit. These things happen, so I return it for a refund and they got it on 6th Aug:

They had no other phones of the same spec anyway so they said they were going to refund me. By 13th Aug, still no refund.

I chased a couple more times and by 14th Sep, still no refund! They say it will now take them 3-5 days to issue a refund:

Of course, I'm not happy with this and the response is that it will still be 3-5 days for a refund:

I waited the full 5 days and guess what, no refund! I opened a PayPal dispute to get my money back (because I paid via PayPal) and 2 weeks later they tell me they now won't refund me unless I close the PayPal dispute:

If I close the PayPal dispute it gets marked resolved and then I have no protection whatsoever to try to claim again, but they are refusing to refund me unless I resolve the dispute. What are my next steps?

Thanks everyone for the comments/suggetions! My concern with going to my card provider (Amex) and doing a chargeback is that it went through my PayPal account for payment and I've read it can cause issues for your account, which gives me cause to hesitate on that option.

I've decided to escalate with PayPal as the retailer is trying to bypass the resolution process and as pointed out to me, they've said they'd refund me twice and haven't, so I don't have much faith they will do it this time!

I also just noticed they have responded on the PayPal dispute to apologise and say they'd issued a refund 13 days ago, so that makes three times!

Somebody copied the company CEO in to this thread (thanks!) and he said he'd have someone look at it right away. True to their word, this is now resolved.

I hope the attention brought to this results in better handling by the company for future customers who may find themselves in the same situation but not be lucky enough to have a social media following.