PayPal Policy Updates You Need to Know – April 2018

Last Friday (3/16/18) PayPal sent out emails to registered PayPal users regarding updates they have made to their services. PayPal does this frequently, and most of the updates don’t require a blog post. This time, there are a lot of changes – and some of them affect you as a Silhouette or Cricut business owner. Let’s look at them – in easy to understand, plain English.

If you’d like to read the full policy update directly from PayPal, click here.

What’s Changing on PayPal – April 2018

To keep this quick and painless so you can get on with your day, I’ve organized the changes into two categories: ‘No Big Deal’ and ‘Need to Know’.

No Big Deal

• PayPal’s Pay After Delivery service has been discontinued.
• Payments sent to bill pay services are no longer covered under PayPal Purchase Protection.
• PayPal may require you to now have a backup payment method in your account.
• Wording related to Venmo is now included in the PayPal agreement. (PayPal owns Venmo.)
• Variable rate pricing has been removed for the ‘Friends and Family’ PayPal option when the receiver has a PayPal account in another country. Rates vary.
• PayPal is clarifying how they figure currency exchange rates.
• Various clarifying privacy policy updates. These all looked standard.

Need to Know

• For Business accounts that use PayPal Instant Transfer, the fee is increasing from $0.25 to 1% of the transaction. I covered PayPal Instant Transfer in this post and will update it when the change occurs.
• You must verify your identity with PayPal. If you do not, you will not be able to spend your PayPal balance – only transfer it to your linked account.
• Coverage for unauthorized transactions is changing under the Seller Protection Plan. Buyers will now need to be logged into their PayPal account for the transaction to be covered under Seller Protection Plans. This may affect recurring billing with subscriptions and such.
• PayPal is giving marketplaces (Etsy, Creative Market, and so on) where you accept PayPal the ability to place holds on your PayPal account.

These changes will take effect on April 19, 2018. If you do not agree to the changes, you’d need to close your PayPal account.

Help calm the panic that comes out after every PayPal change – save the image below to Pinterest.