Pay Pal

Having spent the best part of 3 hours trying to first, understand & then set up paypal on my website, i've finally put a "Donate" button on my website:yess:

When I click it however, it just comes up with an error message from paypal.

Do you think thats because the account is not fully set up yet

anyone else had experience with this ?

 

in the old days, you had to get your paypal account verified

it took a few days to sort ... what they done, was they deposited a small sum of money into your bank account ... Don't get excited as it's normally a few pence

they send you a letter to your registered address and then you contact paypal via internet and quote the amount they deposited ... this enables paypal to verify your bank account awell as your physical address

if I remember correctly, it took about 9 days for us to get 'verified'

contact paypal via email and they will advise and respond in a day or 2 .... don't phone them, as you will be re-directected to an exotic country in a far away place, and I'm not sure if the calls are premium rate

I stand to be corrected, but that's the way I understood it worked in the old days

 

Its not far off that now Dim, they didn't mention a letter though, just by e mail now.

I'm hoping its just that, but I would have thought it would let me access the paypal account, even if it wasn't connected to a bank account.

I'll check the bank next time i'm in town, keep em crossed.

 

Ziggy ... email them ... you will get a response in quick time and they will tell you the procedure ... we always found them to respond in fairly quick time (used to be a powerseller on ebay)

if I remember correctly, there was a website that you could interact 1 on 1 with a paypal representaive ... cannot find the link on my pc now, as I cleaned up the system a few weeks ago and may have deleted that from my favourites

 

Ziggy, you should be able to log into your paypal account via their website (paypal.com, with your email and password). In there you will find a section called 'My account' or 'Account Profile' or similar (I can't remember the exact wording). That will take you to a page that lists all the things Paypal need from you in order to set your account up fully. Some of the things will have ticks next to them, indicating that they're happy with that bit. Some items will indicate that Paypal have something and are in the process of verifying it, and some might indicate that they still want more info from you.

Did you choose a business account or private?

Private is much quicker to set up, but you're limited to about £2000 per calendar month of transactions. The business one requires more info from you, and they will have set a low annual limit, which you then have to ask to increase.

What error message are you getting Zig?

 

its a business account Dave, this is the error message,

 

A lovely nondescript error message. Us programmers give those sort of messages when we don't want to accidentally reveal any technical detail that might be of use to a hacker.

When you set the button up, did you use PayPal's button factory, or did you write the HTML for the button yourself, or follow a tutorial?

The reason I ask this is because PayPal give you lots of choices about the button configuration, and one of the features is to make the button secure by holding all the important details at PayPal, so that thinks like price and merchant ID don't get transmitted.

If you've chose that option (which I think is the default if you used PayPal's button factory), then the button on your website has to be at the domain that you specified at PayPal (which defaults to the domain of your email address). So if you registered at PayPal with, say [email protected], then PayPal would set your default domain to abcdomain.com unless you tell it otherwise. Then if you create a button in the button factory, and put that button on a different domain, say xyzdomain.com, then when someone clicks it, PayPal checks that the request came from your default domain (abcdomain.com) saw that it didn't (because it came from xyzdomain.com), and decides it probably isn't genuine.

Just a thought. It could be other things, but that's something to check.

 

Cheers Dave, I will have a look at that in the morning. You have been a great help as always