"Billing address" required at 3rd party site?

[mikeymo]

I would like to make an online payment and use paypal as the payment method.  I have used paypal at this particular website in the past.  However, now, (after an update), when going to pay for a transaction the website is asking me for my "billing address" (in addition to my email address and name, etc.)    They have never asked this detail before.   Is that out of the ordinary?    I am concerned as to why I need to provide them my "billing address" when I am trying to pay with my paypal account and thus should never receive a bill from them.   Perhaps I am being overly cautious (read:paranoid)?    Thanks in advance for any advice.    

[angelleye]

It's not an ideal design / flow for a PayPal checkout, but it's not uncommon.  Are you buying an item that will be shipped?  You could just enter your shipping address there.  A true billing address is only important if the site is going to checking Address Verification against a credit card, for example.  Since you're usig PayPal there won't be any such check, so you could just enter any address there, really.  I would probably just enter the same address that I selected as my shipping address from PayPal during checkout.

[mikeymo]

Thank you. No, the site will not be shipping us anything. The site is sort of a “pay to play” online game my tweenager is wanting to spend some of his Christmas money at. (Whole other argument.). But since he doesn’t have his own PayPal account he’s paying me to be able to use mine. I just want to be sure I’m not opening up or exposing any of our family personal info that isn’t necessary. I didn’t know if the info is verified that way when they ping PayPal for payment from my account. So am I understanding that I can pretty much put any address and it should go through for him? I’m very thankful for your reply.

[angelleye]

In that case it sounds like maybe the site has a system in place where they simply want some sort of an address to fill in with your customer record on their site. Yeah, I would just use any address, really. It shouldn't matter if you're paying with PayPal and no shipping is necessary.

[mikeymo · Accepted solution]

Thank you again! Really appreciate your time!