Best Practices for Handling Customer Payments Sent with No Fees?

[milkyspit]

I use Paypal extensively in my business and have a business account for that purpose. Since Paypal changed their fee structure, though, I have one nagging problem... would appreciate some advice from others here in the community.

Let me say first and foremost that I have no intention of avoiding legitimate Paypal fees, and try very hard to comply with Paypal's policies. I give my customers ONLY my business Paypal account for payment and never ask them to avoid fees. If they ask me about avoiding Paypal fees I advise them to pay in the usual manner and not worry about the fees I would incur. I do not surcharge my customers for fees incurred, either. As far as I understand Paypal's current policies, I am handling these things the way they require.

However, sometimes a customer will mark a payment in a manner that avoids the fees anyway, and therein lies the problem.

Occasionally I will receive a friendly but somewhat ominous email from Paypal threatening that my account will lose the privilege of handling fee-free transactions if I do not stop customers from sending fee-free transactions. And I try very hard to do just that, but still there are some customers who, of their own accord, bypass the fees.

It is not practical to cancel such customers' payments. I am a one-person business and am stretched far too thin timewise as it is... I simply cannot ride herd on each and every transaction to check for fees, cancel non-compliant payments, communicate with the customer about why their payment was cancelled, solicit a new, "correct" payment, etc.

Just to complicate matters, some of my customers are also personal friends, and some payments really ARE personal in nature.

I have already tried asking Paypal customer support via email what to do, and got no assistance whatsoever. I must say the quality of support was so poor as to be almost of negative helpfulness.

Any suggestions on how to reconcile all the above? I'm at a loss as to what to do, and admittedly am beginning to resent Paypal's threats when I am bending over backwards to do the right thing. Getting one's hand smacked for trying to act in good faith only encourages ill will down the road.

How do you folks handle this sort of thing?

[surplusdealdude]

Do you send out Paypal invoices?  I find that people will use those to pay if they're available.

[PayPal_Olivia]

Hi milkyspit!

Thank you for being conscientious about making sure you adhere to the fee policies. You're absolutely right that it is difficult to make sure that buyer-created payments are hard to control when they are using Send Money. There are a couple of tools available to help you with this.

The first is, as surplusdealdude suggested, invoicing. This allows you to determine the specifics of the payment.

The next is the use of buttons. Having your customers click on a button that you host on a website is another way to determine for the customer what type of payment it will be.

If a buyer sends you a payment that is listed as personal, you do have the option of refunding it and requesting it to be re-sent, but that's cumbersome and it's much better to use one of the afore-mentioned tools to prevent the mistake in the first place.

Lastly, when friends are sending you actual personal payments, they can put some notes in about what it's for, like "This is for Jenny's birthday gift" or "Thanks for getting my lunch, here's the $10 I owe you." You can also send a money request for these types of payments if you're expecting them, and specify the reason for them yourself. I know it's not feasible to do this every single time, but if you're doing it the majority of the time, it will make a difference.

I hope this helps!

Olivia