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Friends & Family payments carry no PayPal fee and no buyer protection. PayPal’s terms do not permit F&F for commercial transactions, and accounts showing a commercial pattern are regularly limited or closed.
Read this before enabling. F&F payments cannot be reversed by you, are not covered by buyer protection, and put the PayPal account itself at risk. Most sellers run it alongside regular PayPal or Stripe rather than as their only method.

Settings

PayPal e-mail

The address buyers send to, shown on the payment page.
Use your primary PayPal email. Payments are matched to orders by email address. If the address here is not the primary one on your PayPal account, incoming payments are not detected and orders stay unprocessed.

PayPal account information

Free text shown to the buyer. PayPal sometimes asks the sender to confirm details about the recipient before releasing the payment, so enter your first and last name and country here, for example John Doe, USA. Buyers who hit that prompt without the information usually abandon the payment or open a ticket.

Underpay percentage

How far below the invoice total a payment can land and still count as paid, from 1% to 20%. Buyers often round down or lose a little to currency conversion. 5% is a reasonable starting point.

Override notes

SellAuth attaches a note to each payment so it can be matched back to an invoice. You can replace the generated notes with your own comma-separated list. Notes that resemble an ordinary personal transfer draw less attention from PayPal than notes that read like a purchase. If you supply fewer notes than are needed, SellAuth combines them to produce more. Available on the Business plan.

Set up IPN

PayPal’s Instant Payment Notification tells SellAuth as soon as a payment arrives, which processes the order and delivers it. Without IPN, every payment has to be checked and processed by hand. There are two ways to set it up. The Worker option takes longer and is the safer of the two.

Fees and limits

All shared method settings apply, plus currency override to bill in a fixed currency. Since F&F carries no PayPal fee, a small discount on this method is an inexpensive way to steer buyers toward it, though it also steers them onto a method with no buyer protection.

Troubleshooting

Orders stay pending after the buyer pays. IPN is not enabled, the notification URL is wrong, or the email on the method is not the primary one on your PayPal account. Some payments process, others do not. Check the underpay percentage. Payments landing further below the total than that are not matched. Buyers are asked to confirm recipient details and abandon the payment. Fill in the PayPal account information field. PayPal limited the account. This cannot be resolved from SellAuth. Enable a second payment method so the shop can keep taking payments while you deal with PayPal.

Next steps

PayPal Goods & Services

The standard PayPal integration, with buyer protection.

Supported payment methods

A second method to run alongside this one.