Comments on: PayPal Donations and Fees

By: ZB

ZB — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 21:49:06 +0000

It's not (just) PayPal, it's laws about payments and income (taxes, mostly).
Paypal could be clearer in describing available service options.
Donation links should be clearly labelled "for donations over $##.##" or "for micro-payments under $#.##" or "for non-charity donations" possibly via right-click.
Language and currency conversion options should likewise be easily found.

By: James Le Cuirot

James Le Cuirot — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 13:11:21 +0000

Hi Sarah. Thanks for clarifying this, it's really not obvious when looking through PayPal's site. I think you misunderstood your final reply from them though. When they said "I strongly do not encourage you to use that option", I think they actually meant personal payments. So you *should* use donate links if you want to comply with the rules. This makes more sense to me, especially given this post I found by a PayPal employee.

https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/Donations-and-Fundraising/Donation-fee/m-p/126588/message-uid/126588/highlight/true#U126588

By: CC

CC — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 02:09:34 +0000

PayPal drives me nuts. Thanks for sharing about your experience.

By: nicky

nicky — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 21:29:03 +0000

To avoid paypal charging any fees simply ask whoever is making a donation to make a gift payment.

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!