Thanks Olivia, for your explanation, however... this simply describes the technical issue, but not the reason as to why this mechanism is in place to begin with. I simply don't understand, what sense it makes for a merchant NOT to make a sale, based on an address check/restriction. The only reason I can imagine, would be, that the merchant is not interested in shipping internationally, yet, as in my case, this stupid address check can very well achieve quite the opposite in effect, because the check of my address can't tell you where I would want to ship to, if I could select a country. In my case: I am living in the USA and wanted to buy something in a German store and ship it to a German addres as a gift. Didn't work! You wrote: "a means of ensuring that the seller accepts that the country of purchase and the country of receipt do not match". What significance does it have if the countries match or not match? Is it any more secure if it matches? if so for whom or for what? or does either paypal or the merchant assume higher shipping costs if it doesn't? or why would this need to match??? You wrote: "If the seller's checkout does not have this function intentionally built in and instead requires all information-gathering to be done on the PayPal site, then the shipping country must match the country from which the payment is being made". Why should it make any difference HOW I enter my address data (manually or automatically). It shouldn't matter! What the customer expects, is a process as in almost any online shop: First enter billing address, then (if it's not the same) enter shipping address. Why does it matter to Paypal? Besides my error message: "Paypal does not allow your country of residence to ship to the country you wish to." doesn't sound like it's addressed to me, but rather to the merchant, cause I don't even want to ship FROM my country of residence (USA) to somewhere else, I wanted to ship FROM Germany TO Germany - and why would THAT not be allowed??? I may understand problems, if I wanted to send a payment to a country where PayPal isn't located business-wise, but PayPal is big in both, the USA and Germany, so again... What's the problem? - There shouln't be one!
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