Almost everyone who uses paypal is familiar with paypal donations options.
We can create a donations button to be kept on our website or blog from PayPal and it can be used to collect donations from people.
However, please note, that this is not as simple as it seems. PayPal also monitors donations and recently I had a bad experience with PayPal donations!
Couple of months back, we had a flood in our country, so in an attempt to help the victims of flood, I made a post on this blog with a PayPal donate button on it.
I started getting donations from the visitors here, but guess what, after a few donations, my account got restricted and I got message from PayPal that my paypal account has been limited until i resolve the issue.
Guess what the issue was? It was to prove that I am affiliated with any charity or donation collecting organization!
Well, truly understandable, that I should be able to prove what I am trying to do! but they said that my account will get terminated if I fail to do so! now that’s crap! lemme tell you why!
- while creating the donation box, there was no such notice that I will be needing a proof of why I am collecting donations and where are they going to be used
- not everyone is registered to a charity organization! like if you get a problem in your street, and you collect money to fix it, it’s your problem, your effort, and your visitors headache! not PayPal’s!
- There should not be only an option to verify or else get terminated!
Tried to contact them on their phone numbers that we didn’t know that we need to be registered to a charity organization to do this, but they refused to let us use our account.
However, I created a detailed email to PayPal, on which they agreed to resume the account once the donations get refunded to the ones who sent it to me! It still sucks! but Luckily I didn’t use the funds yet (coz it was only a few days until I started collecting the funds)
What I learned from all this is, that PayPal donations is not a button for everyone, to place anywhere they want! and also, always expect the unexpected!