I'm panicking a bit here and wondering if anyone can shed any light on this.  I sold an item on ebay and asked for a deposit of £100 with the balance to be paid cash on collection.  The buyer says he put £100 into my paypal account (he funded it from his bank account) two days ago but nothing is showing up for me in paypal.  When I go to myebay, it says that "payment is pending" to paypal.  The email address shown is correct.  Does anyone have any idea what has gone wrong?  Apparently the buyer's paypal account is saying that payment has been made and is waiting to be accepted. 

This happens to a friend of my and she had to log on to paypal and verify her email to receive the funds.  She verified and the funds came straight through to her paypal account.

Hi - thanks, but that can't be the reason as my account is verified.

Sorry I didn't mean account verified for some reasons every time she received a payment she had to verify her email address through paypal as she hadn't verified her email.  It doesn't sound from you other replies that this is your problem.

Did a quick search and found this "An eCheque is payment funded directly from the buyer's bank account. It won't clear until PayPal have actually received the money from the buyer's bank, about 7 working days".

Hi - thanks, that seems to make sense.

No probs :) If you go onto the eBay site and click on 'community' then 'discussion boards' there's a payments (& postage) section which will tell you lots about echeques if you do a search on them. It sounds likes buyers often don't realise that they've even sent one and assume that the money has just come out their bank account straight away.

Thanks - I've posted a question on that site.  What worries me is that surely even if the guy sent an echeque it would show as a payment which hadn't yet cleared in paypal?

an e-cheque should show as an uncleared payment, you would see it in your paypal account.  Basically if you cant see a payment then the money isnt there, make sure this person is legit, I had someone swear blind they had paid the money to my paypal account and that it had left their account, it turned out they had actually hacked into someone elses ebay account and were trying to use their paypal - be very careful.

Have PMd you..