Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Use Paypal? Something You May Not Be Aware Of

I am continuously surprised by the number of people that don't see to know about a Paypal feature - Mass Pay. If you are already familiar with it, you can skip this post, but for the sake of those of you who may not be, I thought I'd share it.

Mass pay is a way to send payments to an individual or a group of individuals at one time. The funds must be available in your account in order for you to send money. The sender pays the fees which are capped at $1 in USD or $1.25 in CAD. There are no fees for the recipient.

Sending mass pay is pretty easy. For US sending accounts, you click the Mass Pay link at the bottom of each screen once you are logged into your account. You'll need to prepare a text, tab delimited file that contains the recipient's email address, the currency and the amount to be paid. Other field options are available. You then upload the file to Paypal.

For Canadian sending accounts, it is pretty much the same procedure except to get to the Mass Pay screen, you'll need to go to the merchant area.

As with normal payments, the recipient gets a notice that they have received funds.

I use Mass Pay for the majority of the payments I send via Paypal. It gives negotiating room when making purchases, paying contractors, etc since the recipient doesn't need to pay any fees. I also ask buyers/clients in many cases to send payment via Mass Pay when appropriate.

From what I understand, the risks are much lower with Mass Pay than with accepting other kinds of payment via Paypal. Unlike with cc funded payments, buyers cannot go back to their cc company where Paypal will typically reverse the charges immediately without even waiting for a response from the seller.

Hope this has saved someone reading this some money!

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