1.1. Payment scenarios and possible solutions: PayPal

PayPal is a widely used method to handle online money transfers. It has a wide coverage around the world, being present in 203 countries, and its fees are lower than its competitors’. Creating a new account is actually free, so it’s not surprising that it was selected to be one of our regular payment methods.

However, some of the terms and processes can be confusing for users so we gathered some important basic notions and questions to help you understand PayPal. 

Let’s get started:

• Is PayPal available in every country?

The simplest this question might seem, the complicated it can be. 

First of all, PayPal allows users to verify if they can have access to their services in a certain country using this link:

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_display-country-functionality-outside&dispatch=5885d80a13c0db1f8e263663d3faee8d94717bd303200c3af9aadd01a5f55080

Depending on your country, you’ll see at this point that there are more possible statuses a country can have, as follows: 

1. No result - not finding your country in the list means that PayPal is not operating there. Neither sending nor receiving payment is possible. 
2. “Send” - this means that you can transfer money to other countries. However, if this is the only status you can see, we will look for another solution to send you the money, as PayPal does not allow you to receive a payment. Unfortunately, this is a no go as well.

       3. “Receive” - this status is visible only for countries where the testers can actually receive their money in their accounts. PayPal still allows users to create accounts in countries where receiving money is not enabled, so please pay extra attention when picking a payout method. 

Our payout process is mostly automated thus it is not possible for us to check the statuses of the testers’ PayPal accounts before making the transfers, so it is your responsibility to make sure that everything is alright with your account. 

Example of an error message displayed when attempting to transfer money to a tester’s account which is registered in a country where receiving transfers is not enabled by PayPal:

        4. "Withdraw” - If you are able to receive the payment, you will also be allowed to withdraw it at least in one way. There are 4 possible scenarios that can occur:

• Withdraw via your card (usually, it is mentioned if it’s about credit, debit or prepaid card)
• Withdraw via your local bank account 
• Withdraw via a US bank account - this can be very useful if PayPal doesn’t allow you to withdraw your money using the first two options
• Withdraw via a check

Example of a country where sending, receiving and withdrawing are allowed:

• While creating a PayPal account, make sure that your account is properly claimed by performing all the steps PayPal requires during account creation.

While transferring payments, we often receive error messages that the account to which we attempt to send money is NOT linked or is incomplete. This seems to be a trivial step, but still essential. If you are aware that your PP account is not correctly linked and would like to receive your well-earned money, please fix this as soon as you can.