Comments on: PayPal Donations and Fees

By: Matt

Matt — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 19:12:51 +0000

Ha, I just found this information. You just get a slightly reduced rate schedule as a 501c3, still not free. Interestingly, this blog post was the second google result and the information I wanted was the third…

https://merchant.paypal.com/cgi-bin/marketingweb?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=merchant/donations

By: Matt

Matt — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 19:06:29 +0000

I just concluded my first fundraiser on my site using paypal. Kelly has joined the race for others team and just started her own fundraiser. I accepted the fees as unavoidable. I've found many other sites offering fundraiser pages and online donation services for a fee. The paypal fees are actually comparatively quite low. But I'm curious. Does anyone know if you create a paypal business account and supply proper 501c3 credentials, can you accept donations without any fees?

By: Joshua McGee

Joshua McGee — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 19:09:13 +0000

No not really! This is my perpetual experience with customer service reps. I have an idea that only "Level 3" or whatever service technicians are allowed to do anything other than cut-and-paste, and if there's a question that's not on their canned responses, SOL. Please note, I appreciate the PayPal Personal account is free and PayPal doesn't owe me anything. Sure they do. All the time the money stays in their system rather than some retailer's pocket or a bank account (deposits to the latter of which they artificially delay), they're earning interest. Shuffling the bytes to say whether it's in your account or another's costs essentially nothing once the infrastructure is in place. So, you have a business relationship. just in case anyone needs to know how to actually change a url from donation to standard transfer is to change "cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_donations" to "cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_xclick" Ooh, now that's a good tidbit to know.

By: Vlad Alexa

Vlad Alexa — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 15:00:30 +0000

just in case anyone needs to know how to actually change a url from donation to standard transfer is to change "cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_donations" to "cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_xclick"

By: oyunlar

oyunlar — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 04:31:44 +0000

Whoops! I mean Sarah – duh!

By: Nicole Price

Nicole Price — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 15:48:32 +0000

I came back to check if any thing new has been commented and find the two comments by Tom to be quite amusing! Duh indeed!

By: Wiktor

Wiktor — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:27:43 +0000

Hallo Sarah,

Nice article. I have similar problem however I found out the charities are charged discount fee of around 1,5 %

I tried to go around it but it seems if you want to be legal you just have to accept it

By: Tom

Tom — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 03:18:20 +0000

Whoops! I mean Sarah – duh!

By: Tom

Tom — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 03:17:34 +0000

Thanks Nicola, that's a really interesting article. Shame you had to go through so much crap to learn the ins and outs!

By: Nicole Price

Nicole Price — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 10:39:50 +0000

I have not had to use my paypal account so far for any donation and your experience and what you have had to go through has given me the heebie jeebies. I shall indeed be very careful if I ever have to set up a collection. Thank you.