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Fun and games with Paypal

I’ve been REALLY busy yesterday and today, working on developing my online services page – My Online Services. It’s been a lot of fun! I’ve really enjoyed the process of sitting down and getting serious about what I’m doing, and putting it all onto my website.

But I ran into a small problem today with PayPal…

I used a ‘Donation’ button to allow the payment of variable amounts via PayPal, since there didn’t seem to be an option available for variable amount selections with any of their other payment and button options.

This worked fine for a single transaction this morning, but then shortly after I received an email stating that my account was being limited in its functionality while a legal investigation proceeded with my use of the Donation button.

It seems that in Australia, PayPal need to comply with Australian laws that make it illegal for any person or business to receive donations unless they’re a non-profit organisation. Good on ya, Australia….

PayPal advised me I’ll need to prove I was a non-profit organisation before they’d return full functionality to my account. Until this happened, I would not be able to send money to anyone, nor would I be able to withdraw money from my account, but my account could still receive money.

So I immediately deleted the Donations button from my account. I did some research and found that I could use a Buy Now button which required an amount to be set – but I could put in $0.00 which would mean the buyer would have to set the amount themselves.

This is what I should have done in the first place, but there was no documentation anywhere that discussed that. And the only way I found out about it was on a site that was talking about ‘a secret tip’ that would allow me to do that.

Why the hell does PayPal want it secret? Blows my mind.

Anyway, after deleting the Donations button and setting up the Buy Now button to do what I wanted, I then phoned PayPal to discuss the problem.

They accepted it was an error, noted that I’d removed the button from my account, and advised me to simply confirm my identity via the Resolution process. Their Legal Department would review my account, the notes on it that I’d advised, and would get back to me within the next 3 business days.

I do hope this gets resolved. I’d hate to have to use an alternative to PayPal because I’ve already got all payment options and bank accounts linked up through PayPal; it’d be really annoying having to go through it all again with some other provider.

However, if any of you reading this think there’s a much better solution with an alternate provider to PayPal, I’m open minded enough to look into it if you think it’s worthwhile. Please leave your recommendations in the comments below. Thanks!

UPDATE 10 Jan 2014

It took them only 15 hours instead of 3 days, but I was advised their review is complete and they’ve returned my account back to normal. Yay!


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