[smtjoy]

Hi all,

I just wanted to bring up PayPal and using their invoices. I started to a few months ago because of some issues I had and wanted to let everyone know what they are, how to use them, and why.

I started using them because of an incident where I was purchasing a card from a BST and the seller wanted it to be paid by PayPal gift. I somehow entered the wrong email and the money went to someone else I had done business with before. The way PayPal gift works is there are no fees but you don’t have any recourse once the money is sent, it voids all PayPal buyer protections and beyond that only the person receiving the money can cancel it and PayPal can do nothing to help you if anything happens. It took a few phone calls to get to the bottom of it and I was finally able to convince them to cancel the transaction to get my money back, what a pain. I also had a friend with an incident where the buyer made a typo on giving them their email address and the money got sent to someone randomly and they were never able to recover it as they never got any reply from that email account the money was sent to, ouch.

During all this I decided to call PayPal and find out what all I could do to help protect myself from this happening again. They recommended that I use a PayPal invoice anytime I sell something so I have proof of the transaction and it also gives the buyer the option to pay however they want and they know I will receive the money. They can still pay with fees and get buyer protection but can choose gift option also. From a sellers stand point it gives me a record of the sale and also lets me print postage labels to the buyer to make it easy to ship them their card out to a confirmed address.

I have been very happy using them and just wanted to let the board know what I had found out.