paying with paypal

I always use goods and services to pay. A seller requested I use friends and family (to avoid the fee). I looked at doing that, but it says I need to have a balance or an account to use this method, and neither apply.

Using f & f shows the following: No fee if you use your PayPal balance or bank account for domestic transactions. So since I don't have a balance or bank account associated with my account it seems I would incur the fee.

Paying with g & s shows: No fee for you. The seller pays the fee. Plus, you're covered by PayPal Purchase Protection.

Anyone ever run across a request like this?

eta: this is not a CPF transaction.

I think it is because once you gift (and be very careful) your money is a Gone Pecan. You can't get it back! No claims protection. So you have to have the funds available. Make sure you trust the person you are doing business with. Ironically, I trust more folks here than I do my some of my own family.

Occasionally if I want to cover the fee I'll pay extra to cover the fee - would rather do that than use friends & family. If it is someone I have dealt with before (repeatedly) and I have a balance in my pp account I will sometimes do friends & family.

If they want fee covered and they have no history with you and little history on the site I would cover the fee if required.

If you dig a little deeper into Friends and Family, you have to enter the persons name. This was done because people were "gifting" monies without fees that PayPal knew weren't family.
For real family there isn't a problem, but some people can't play by the rules and ruin it for everyone.

Never had an issue sending monies thru F&F .

If you are sending any decent amount of money, ask them if they want you to cover fees. The extra protection is worth a few dollars more. If they are still adamant about using the gift option, that is a major red flag for me...I would stay away.

Using the Friends & Family option when making a purchase is an abuse of PP's generosity, it's dishonest, and it's a good way to get screwed.

Whats that old saying? Oh yes, It's a lot harder to cheat an honest man than one who's not.

~ Chance

I have to agree with much of the above. When receiving money for goods or services via Paypal, one pays a fee for the service. The current fee is 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. When a seller asks you to use the F&F or "gift" option, they are trying to weasel out of paying Paypal what they are rightfully owed. People will sometimes ask you to add 3% to cover the fee when they are selling only one or a few items, rather than operating a regular business. That's cool with me. Like nfetterly, I am usually okay with covering the fee myself in such cases by paying the additional percentage to the seller. I would walk away from someone who asked me to make a transaction in any other way. :thumbsdow

Thanks guys. ...

(not on cpf)

I've made a couple transactions where the ad said 'paypal gift' and the price. I messaged the seller and asked if I could send it 'regular' if I included some extra to cover the fees. both times they accepted. I did this because I don't want to lose my (really useful) paypal account because I got caught trying to save a few bucks. I pay some monthly bills by paypal.

as a seller, I was surprised once when the buyer sent the money by paypal gift, without any prior mention of it.


with so much money to be made, why isn't there a good competitor to paypal? bidpay had a shot, but was closed. that was a very good domain name for the purpose. and Western Union was behind it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BidPay

Another paypal question. If you have, say $10.00 available - can you make a $20.00 purchase and use all of your $10.00 balance and the rest from your credit card?

And can someone pay you to your paypal account if you are not verified?

5S8Zh5 said:

Another paypal question. If you have, say $10.00 available - can you make a $20.00 purchase and use all of your $10.00 balance and the rest from your credit card?

And can someone pay you to your paypal account if you are not verified?

Click to expand...

If yo are asking if you can use your PayPal funds and make up the difference between your balance and the total transaction and use your credit source, the answer is yes.

You can send monies to non-verified persons. They will however have a hold on funds until typically 5 business days after the transaction.

With eBay tying your PayPal account to eBay, they should also show on the auction that the sellers is PayPal verified. If you use the BIN option, you can't see if the seller is verified, or at least I can't see it.