I have recent experience of going through a dispute process over an item I bought from ebay using Paypal and although it was frustrating to an extent, I found them OK to deal with.
They do answer the phone promptly (at least in my neck of the woods) and I was pleased to find their call centre personnel were in Dublin, Ireland. I've generally had poor experiences when dealing with offshore call centres in places such as India or the Phillippines (mainly the former).
I had two issues with them:
1) They were not able to/did not wish to access the ebay buyer/seller questions for the item I'd purchased. They just appear to look at the advertisment wording and the dispute statements from the buyer and seller. Not a lot of info to make a judgement imo, especially when the seller is dishonest and you have back up evidence in ebay questions.
Thankfully, I managed to convince Paypal that the seller had made a balls up and they ruled the case in my favour. Therefore, my advice for anyone involved in a dispute is to ring Paypal and ensure they do understand your case properly.
2) Short notice to supply additional information over the Christmas holiday. For example, despite sending the item back by tracked delivery, because someone else had signed for it and the house number didn't show on the tracking info (just the electronic signature and postcode could be retrieved), they also wanted a scan of the postal receipt that showed the house number. I was given two days to do this, including New Years Day. If I'd been away visiting relatives etc., I could have been left in the situation of having the case automatically closed down (without a refund) despite having sent the item back.
The reason I didn't use ebay to file a dispute is that they are overhauling their processes and it didn't work properly. Also, their customer service is offshore which doesn't inspire confidence.
