PayPal Integration

After your auction ends, you can export a list of invoices that owe you money and use PayPal to send them to users. This feature is primarily for use with online auctions; if you're running an in-person auction, you'll usually have people pay before they leave, so billing everyone all at once doesn't really make sense.

1. Go to your auction's page and and click on the Users tab.
2. Make any necessary adjustments to your invoices, then click Set Open Invoices to Ready
3. Click Export, then PayPal Invoice CSV. You'll download a CSV file.
4. Go to Paypal's batch invoice page (you'll be prompted to sign into Paypal)
5. Click Browse, then Import Batch Invoice File. Select the file you downloaded earlier.
6. Review the invoices to make sure they are correct, then click Send Invoices
7. Use PayPal to keep track of who has paid.

FAQ and troubleshooting

My users page says No PayPal invoices

Only invoices that are Ready get exported. If everyone has paid, or if you forgot to do step 2 above, you won't have any invoices to export.

PayPal takes you to a page that says "Let's get you back on track" instead of the batch invoice screen

This is an issue on Paypal's end that impacts newly created Paypal accounts. You can open a case with them, by emailing Merchant Technical Support merchanttechsupport@paypal.com

It may help to reference case 12959943, which is the same issue when my club encountered it. Typically, it takes about 2 weeks for Paypal to reply, so you may want to find some other method to send out invoices for now (such as using an older Paypal account).

Paypal says We had trouble reading your file

Make sure you're uploading the correct CSV. The users CSV file won't work -- the correct file will have the word paypal in the file name.

There are multiple PayPal CSV files

Paypal will only let you batch invoice 150 users at a time, so if there's more than one file listed, download them all, and repeat step 4-6 for each file. Congrats on running an auction where more than 150 people owe you money!

There's an invoice missing from the list

Users who are owed money (sold more than they bought) are not included in this list. I am assuming most clubs will want to pay these people in cash when they drop off their lots, or by check afterwards (the seller's address is listed on the users page). This will allow you to avoid the PayPal fees for these users.

Also any invoices that are open or paid are not included.

Downloading and uploading these files and keeping track of who paid is awful!

I know. Ideally, I would integrate completely with something like Shopify or PayPal, and handle all payments seamlessly on this site.

Unfortunately, any payment method that allows credit card payments allows charge backs, which is not something my club has the resources to handle.

And any payment method that doesn't allow charge backs (like Bitcoin) is very difficult for end users. At this time, I'm committed to keeping this site completley free, and there just isn't a system that would allow this site to automatically handle payments without taking on a lot of liability.

Is there any risk here?

Yes, of course: By using this feature, your club is taking on all the risks of online payments -- like charge backs and an increased likelyhood of getting audited on your taxes. But, it's very handy to click a couple buttons and invoice all your users.

But I don't want to use Paypal!

At the moment I am not aware of other payment processors that support batch invoicing from a CSV file. If there's one you'd like to use, let me know -- it's not difficult to export the data.