That’s correct, this new API allows us to facilitate disputes for payments that come through your account. This is good for two main reasons:
- It protects itch.io from scammers who show up, sell something stolen, then disappear without giving us any ability to refund the buyers. This is one of the primary reasons why we disabled direct payments on PayPal a few years back.
- We can manage customer support for you related to payments. We already do this for most of our sellers, but it lets our team respond timely is issues and dispute from buyers to make sure all parties are happy. A common issue with the old system is someone would sell something, it was broken, the buyer would reach out to us for a refund, and the seller would be unavailable. The only thing we could tell them was “Open a dispute on PayPal.” This makes it hard for people to trust itch.io when they can encounter scenarios where they feel ripped off. This way we can prevent a purchase from escalating to a dispute. You can review our refund policy here: https://itch.io/docs/legal/terms#9-refunds If you feel like your products need special handling with refunds then you can reach out to our support team and we can leave a note one your account.
Also, all of this functionality provided by the new PayPal API matches what we have had available with Stripe Connect since we launched it many years back. So we aren’t introducing any new process here, only making what we normally do available for PayPal direct payments.
Hope that explains