Selling Preferences
This Profile article describes the settings available to you regarding the preferences for using your PayPal account to sell goods or services.
Sales Tax
The Sales Tax section of your Profile allows you to set a sales tax rate for a particular geographic region that will be applied to all payments sent to you from your customers’ PayPal accounts. You can specify a different tax rate for each of the 50 U.S. states, and also for each country. You can also choose to apply the sales tax to either the sum total of the items purchased or the sum total of the items plus the shipping and handling fees.
Note:If you sell a specific item that requires a special tax rate (or no tax at all), you can override your Profile-based tax settings by passing in a special tax variable in the form data you post to PayPal when initiating the checkout.
Shipping Calculations
This Profile article describes the settings available to you regarding the preferences for using your PayPal account to sell goods or services.
Sales Tax
The Sales Tax section of your Profile allows you to set a sales tax rate for a particular geographic region that will be applied to all payments sent to you from your customers’ PayPal accounts. You can specify a different tax rate for each of the 50 U.S. states, and also for each country. You can also choose to apply the sales tax to either the sum total of the items purchased or the sum total of the items plus the shipping and handling fees.
Note:If you sell a specific item that requires a special tax rate (or no tax at all), you can override your Profile-based tax settings by passing in a special tax variable in the form data you post to PayPal when initiating the checkout.
Shipping Calculations
In the Shipping Calculations section of your Profile, you can specify shipping charges that will automatically be applied to certain types of PayPal purchases. PayPal will add shipping charges to purchases made through the PayPal Shopping Cart, Buy Now buttons, and Donations. Pay-Pal will not add shipping charges to payments made with PayPal Subscriptions and Recurring
Payments,Winning Buyer Notification, or Instant Purchase on eBay listings.
You can specify different shipping preferences for each type of currency: you can choose to charge a flat amount based on the total amount of purchase, or you can choose to charge a percentage of the total amount of purchase. Once you’ve selected the method of shipping costs, you can specify the various levels of shipping costs and the price ranges for which each level applies. Figure 2-5 shows the screen where you specify the price ranges and the associated shipping cost for each range.
There is also a setting in the Shipping Calculations section of your Profile that, if enabled,allows you to override the values listed in this section on a per-transaction basis, if you have an item that requires special shipping charges. This is done by passing in the new shipping value in the form data that you post to PayPal when initiating the checkout.
Payment Receiving Preferences
The Payment Receiving Preferences section of your Profile allows you to configure some specific PayPal options that allow you to further customize your customers’ buying experience.
You can configure the following options in this section of your Profile:
- • Block payments from U.S. users who do not provide a Confirmed Address.
- • Block payments sent to me in a currency I do not hold. You can choose to block payments sent to you in a currency you do not hold, or you can choose to convert them to U.S. dollars.
- • Block accidental payments.
- • Block payments from users who have non-U.S. PayPal accounts.
- • Block payments from users who initiate payments from the Pay Anyone subtab of the Send Money tab.
- • Block payments from users who pay with eCheck for website and Smart Logo payments, or German bank transfer for all website payments except eBay. You can require customers to pay with eCheck for website and Smart Logo payments.
- • Add Instructions to Seller. You can choose whether to offer your customers the ability to send you specific instructions when placing an order.
- • Credit Card Statement Name. You can specify the name that will appear on your customers’ credit card statements when they pay you with a credit card.
Instant Payment Notification Preferences
PayPal’s Instant Payment Notification (IPN) allows you to automate certain aspects of your business by enabling a server-to-server communication to automatically take place whenever you receive a PayPal payment or whenever a status changes occurs on a transaction. This section of your Profile allows you to turn on IPN and specify the URL to which PayPal posts the notifications. For more information on IPN.
Reputation
Similar to eBay’s notion of a user’s feedback score, you can earn a reputation in the PayPal system through your reputation score. Your reputation score indicates the number of unique verified PayPal members who have paid you. Your score is updated 30 days after a transaction takes place, to ensure that your reputation reflects successful exchanges. Your score is displayed on your Account Overview page, next to your Account Status. The Reputation section of your Profile allows you to cap this number at 1,000, if you would like to do so for security reasons.
Website Payment Preferences
The Website Payment Preferences section of your Profile allows you to configure a number of PayPal features that you can use to further customize a customer’s buying experience. The features that are configured through this area of your Profile are as follows:
- • Auto Return: When enabled, Auto Return will send customers back to your website immediately following payment completion. When Auto Return is disabled, customers will need to click a button to return to your website.
- • Payment Data Transfer: When Payment Data Transfer is enabled and implemented correctly, customers will be able to view details of their just-completed transaction after they are returned to your website following their checkout on the PayPal site.
- • Encrypted Website Payments: For added security, you can choose to block payments that originate from nonencrypted HTML buttons.
- • PayPal Account Optional: When this option is enabled, your customers do not have to have a PayPal account in order to pay you through the PayPal website. They will be given the option to create a PayPal account, but if they choose not to, they can still submit payment by entering their credit card details.
- • Contact Telephone Number: When this option is enabled, your customers will be prompted to include a telephone number where they can be reached to discuss details of the transaction. You can make this field required, optional, or not include it at all.
Encrypted Payment Settings
Through PayPal’s Encrypted Website Payments (EWP) feature, you can encrypt the code in your HTML buttons so that a fraudulent third party is unable to modify information contained in the code, such as item prices and quantities. In the Encrypted Payment Settings section of your Profile, you can download the PayPal public certificate, which is needed to encrypt your code. You can also upload your public certificate to the PayPal site, which uses
it to verify the digital signature that you used when creating the encrypted button code.
Custom Payment Pages
You can customize the checkout screens that your customers see in order to match the style of your website. In the Custom Payment Pages section of your Profile, you can create new page styles and specify settings such as the image users see at the top of the pages, the background
color for the pages, and the border colors. You can create and maintain multiple page styles, but only one style at a time can be the primary style used. Every account comes with a default style: the traditional blue-and-white pages that PayPal customers are used to seeing.
Invoice Templates
PayPal offers an easy way to create and send itemized invoices to your customers via email. In the Invoice Templates section of your Profile, you can create templates that contain prepopulated data for invoices that you commonly send out to multiple customers. This timesaving measure prevents you from having to type in the same invoice information every time you want to send a new invoice.
Risk Controls
PayPal Risk Controls allow eligible sellers the ability to set their risk preferences to accept or decline payments based on certain criteria. Before using Risk Controls, you must accept a user agreement that explains the terms under which you use the controls. The types of controls available to you are explained in the sections that follow. In addition to enabling you to configure these settings, the Risk Controls section of your Profile also allows you to search for payments that were declined or accepted and flagged for risk by your Risk Control settings.
Country Monitor
The Country Monitor control allows you to specify which countries you will and will not accept payments from. You can also choose to accept payments from certain countries, but have PayPal send you a special notification whenever such a payment occurs.
Maximum Amount
The Maximum Amount control allows you to specify a maximum amount for any PayPal payment you receive. You can apply this maximum to all PayPal payments or only payments made from customers with an unconfirmed U.S. address. That option gives you added protection, since PayPal’s address verification checks help to reduce fraud. For transactions above the maximum amount you specify, you can choose to deny the transaction, accept the transaction, or accept the transaction but receive special notification when it occurs.
Direct Payment/Virtual Terminal
The Direct Payment/Virtual Terminal control allows you to specify settings that control whether credit card payments made through PayPal’s Direct Payment or Virtual Terminal products are accepted or denied.
Language Encoding
The Language Encoding section of your Profile allows you to select the language used on your website. This setting determines the encoding used on the payment buttons used to send data to PayPal. Currently, there are six options for this value:
- • Western European languages (including English)
- • Chinese (traditional)
- • Chinese (simplified)
- • Japanese
- • Korean
- • Russian
