What is going on with Paypal? new restrictions on use?

usignuolo

(not sure if this is the right thread, but will start it here as the explanation may be poorly designed software).

Anyone know what is happening at Paypal? I used to be able to buy goods online in the USA, pay for them with my UK Paypal account (which is linked to my Visa Barclaycard) and have them shipped to my relatives in the USA without any problem.

Now I can't do this anymore. I bought a house warming present online in the USA for my son who has just moved house in New York and tried to put his new address into Paypal as the shipping address. It kept defaulting the country line back to the UK.

I contacted Paypal and this was their reply:

"....when adding a new shipping address you won't be able to change your country of residence." They said billing and shipping addresses must be in the same country.

To have stuff shipped to the US, they say I need to set up a US account and this requires a US address and credit card.

".......If you need to add an international address, you will need to open a new PayPal account and select your new country of residence during the Sign Up process".

Fine I will set up a US account with Paypal as well. Well no actually. To do that I need a US address for billing and a matching US debit or credit card. Which clearly I do not have. (Originally I had a Paypal .com account but then they set up Paypal.co.uk and now it reroutes me automatically to Paypal.co.uk.)

Amazon doesn't do this. Anyone care to hazard a guess over what is going in at Paypal?

Moneymaker

It's a sledgehammer technique to reduce fraud.

OneADay

You could simply let Paypal do its own thing, and leave a note to the buyer to send to the address in the US (and also confirm with seller that they will accept that option). You should be able to do a print screen of the paypal screen to show to the seller the card linked to your paypal account is linked to the address on file with paypal (the uk address).

But ask the seller to ship to the other address in US as its a gift item. Most sellers will accept that (not all perhaps).

Mr_Warren_2

I have had a handfull of goods bought by me via PayPal from the UK and shipped to a US address (our main office) as shipping costs to the UK would have been too high or Spain and France. Never had any problems. I just chose the US address as my main address at the time.

usignuolo

It seems to be a recent development. My son actually moved, within NY, last month. So the first thing I did was to try to edit his previous address which I have on file with Paypal (and which is shown as US, not UK). Turns out the Paypal edit option doesn't allow you to modify the existing shipping address, just add extra ones. So I tried to add his new address in NY.

This time it prompted me for a county and added UK automatically to the last address line. No option not to include it. You would find the same if you tried to add your company's US address as shipping address now, although it will presumably be OK if you already have it set up.

I wondered if Paypal hadn't thought through fully using an address completion macro or whatever it is. It seems though it is deliberate. When I emailed them I pointed out I have been a verified customer practically since Day 1 and that I was only trying to amend my son's existing address. But the answer was still no.

It is no problem of course if you are buying from a site where you are dealing with a real person, you can get round it by asking them to correct the shipping address. But it's more difficult if it is an automated response from a computer system.

I heard Paypal has done a sweetheart deal with some big corps in the USA to only use certain mail houses and to use standard fees, when shipping on Paypal payments. That might be another reason why they want billing and shipping addresses to be the same, they need to use country standard shipping rates.