"Account Settings in PayPal" by Dipen

Account Settings
        You can set a number of preferences in your PayPal account. You access these preferences by logging in to your account and clicking the Profile subtab on the Account Overview page. Depending on your account type, some settings may not be available. A Personal account has the least number of settings available, and a Business account has the most. This section describes all settings that are available within the PayPal Profile.


Account Information
        Account Information settings manage your basic account information. The sections that follow describe what you can manage in each area.


Email 
        You can attach up to eight email addresses to your PayPal account. The Email section of your Profile is where you add additional email addresses, and it’s also where you select the primary address. When PayPal sends an email notification to you, it sends the email to your primary address. If you use
Multi-User Access for your account, this is the area where you specify which 


Street Address
        In the Street Address section of your Profile, you enter in the various physical locations that you use. You can enter multiple addresses, but only specify one address as your official home address and one address as your official business address. Each address can become Confirmed by following the usual steps for confirming an address.

Password
         The Password section of your Profile is where you can update the password used to log in to your PayPal account. Your password should generally not be based on a word that can be found in the dictionary, and it should contain one or more special characters, such as a number or other keyboard symbol. This helps increase the security of your password, to prevent anyone from accessing your account without your permission. In the Password section, you can also update the two security questions used to validate your identity to PayPal in case you forget your password or need to contact customer service for any other reason.


Notifications

         In the Notifications section of your Profile, you can specify when and how you want PayPal to email you. When you first create your PayPal account, your account is configured with some default values for certain email notifications, such as to receive an email whenever you send or receive money. You can disable these notifications, but it is not recommended. You can also add notifications to receive email about PayPal third-party promotions, PayPal policy updates, auction seller tips, updates from the PayPal Developer Network (PDN), and more. You can also specify whether you want to receive email notifications in HTML or plain text format.

Tip:The Notifications section of your Profile is where you register to receive DevTalk, PayPal’s email newsletter for developers. DevTalk contains announcements and information that are relevant to developers of all skill levels, as well as promotional offers from PayPal partners. If you are a developer involved with building websites at any level, I encourage you to sign up to receive DevTalk.

        Since PayPal is the most spoofed company in the world, you should always take steps to ensure an email you receive from PayPal is legitimate. See the “Recognizing a Spoof Email” sidebar to educate yourself on some red flags that you should be aware of when trying to determine if an email that claims to be from PayPal is legitimate.

RECOGNIZING A SPOOF EMAIL

         PayPal is the most spoofed site in the world, for obvious reasons. Every day, thousands of fraudulent emails claiming to be from PayPal are sent to unsuspecting individuals, but these emails are actually sent by fraudsters

who hope that the recipient will believe the email is legitimate and provide the sender with the username and password to the recipient’s PayPal account. Once a fraudster has access to someone’s PayPal account, he or she has direct access to the PayPal customer’s bank accounts and other financial records.

Here are some red flags to watch out for when you receive an email that claims to be from PayPal:

• • Generic greeting: Official PayPal emails will always address you by your first and last name. An email that begins with “Dear PayPal member,” or something similar, is fraudulent.

• • False sense of urgency: Spoof emails will attempt to trick you by saying that a certain action must take place ASAP, or by a certain date.

• • Fake links: Spoof emails will almost always have a URL for you to click that will take you to a page that looks just like the PayPal homepage. If the link looks suspicious, don’t click it. You should only ever enter your password on a web page that begins with the URL https://www.paypal.com.

• • Request for personal information: An official email from PayPal will never ask you for any personal information, such as your PayPal account password, contact information, or financial information.

• • Insecure URL: Any URL that asks you for personal information should begin with https://. If “http” is not followed by “s”, the site is not secure, and you should not enter any personal information.

• • Pop-up boxes: PayPal never uses pop-up boxes in email notifications.

• • Attachments: PayPal never includes attachments in email notifications.  If you receive an email that you believe to be fraudulent, forward it to spoof@paypal.com.

Time Zone

        The Time Zone section of your Profile is where you specify the time zone you live in. This ensures that the times for your transactions are stored correctly in the PayPal system.

Multi-User Access

          Multi-User Access is a feature that is only available to Business accounts. It is useful if you want to provide access to your PayPal account to multiple people, but allow them to perform only specified actions once they are inside your account. For example, you may want to provide access to someone in your shipping department to view the shipping addresses for

completed orders, but you may not want to give that person access to add a bank account or send money from your account.

        The following sections describe how to set up and use Multi-User access.

Creating an Administrator To set up Multi-User Access, you must first specify a single administrator who will grant permissions to other users as well as receive notifications for all other users’ activity on the account. It is required that this address be different than the email address that receives payments

for the account, so if you have only one email address attached to your PayPal account, you will first need to add a second email address. Once you have added that additional email address, you can specify it as the administrative email address for Multi-User Access.

Adding Users

         Once you have specified an administrator for Multi-User Access, you can begin adding additional users. You create a user by specifying the person’s first and last name, and creating a user ID that the person will use to log in to your account, as well as a password. The user ID is not an email address, but simply a string between 10 and 16 characters in length that contains

only English and German letters and numbers. No special characters are allowed, and the user

          ID is not case sensitive. The administrator should tell users what their user ID and password is, and inform them that they will not log in to the PayPal account with an email address, but instead with this user ID.

Specifying Privileges

         The administrator has fine-grained control over which permissions to grant the user. The following list outlines the permissions that an administrator may grant a user:

• • Send Money: Send money from this account to another.

• • Request Money: Request money from another user to be sent via PayPal.

• • Add Funds: Add funds to the PayPal account via an attached bank account.

• • Refunds: Refund a previous payment transaction.

• • Withdraw Funds:Withdraw funds to an attached bank account.

• • Cancel Payments: Cancel a pending payment from the account.

• • View Balance: View the balance of the account.

• • View Profile: View details on the Profile tab.

• • Edit Profile: Edit details on the Profile tab.

• • Settlement Files & Scheduled Downloads: Access settlement files and scheduled download logs via direct HTTP post. For more information on using these features.

• • Authorization & Settlements: View and capture transaction authorizations.

• • Use Virtual Terminal: Process credit card transactions in real time via your PayPal account. (You must be approved for Virtual Terminal.)

• • Discuss Account with Customer Service: Contact PayPal customer service to discuss account issues.

API Access

        PayPal’s API allows developers to leverage PayPal’s payments platform in their own applications by remotely calling PayPal operations from within their own code. The API is covered in detail in Chapter 6. This section of your Profile allows you to request API credentials, which are used to identify your API calls to PayPal.

Business Information

        The Business Information section of your Profile is where you update information about your business, such as the contact information, category of business, average monthly volume, and when the business was established. The one item you cannot change is your business name.

        For security reasons, PayPal does not allow you to update the business name once it has been initially set up. There’s a web form you can submit to make a change if you make a typographical error, but you cannot automatically change the business name through the Profile section of your PayPal account, so make sure you get it right the first time!