Paypal Account freezes over Donate button

[ankewehner.livejournal.com]

Since a lot of people use the Donate button for crowdfunding or tipjars, this seems important:

Paypal froze Regretsy's account because they used the Donate button for something that was not a "worthy cause". (The fact that their representative said that while collecting money for a sick cat was a worthy cause, collecting money for poor people was a charity, and not worthy, just adds to the WTF-ness, but, either way, I suspect collecting tips would not be considered "worthy", either.)

As far as I can tell, they pulled that policy out of thin air. It's not mentioned on the site where you create buttons, and the "Which button should I chose?" help site describes Donations with "Let customers choose a fixed or variable donation amount" - "customers" implying it's OK for business use, doesn't it?

Anyway, if someone knows of an alternative that does not require you to live in the US and/or to have a credit card, I'd love to hear about it.

Comments

O_O

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

That's maddening. PayPal doesn't seem to OFFER any other option for "let the person sending money choose the amount." I don't care what the button SAYS, just what it DOES, because I can't make like 20 buttons in a day for all the Poetry Fishbowl poems.

The stupid, it burns like hydrogen.

Re: O_O

[ankewehner.livejournal.com]

I agree completely.

And I think I've seen the Donate button used as a tipjar on webcomics for close to a decade, which just adds to the "pulled out of thin air" impression.

Re: O_O

[ankewehner.livejournal.com]

OK, I may have jumped the gun a bit there, depending how accurate the statement before the quotes on regretsy is.

Poking around in PayPal's acceptable use policies, I found that "collecting donations as a charity" is something that needs pre-approval, so the issue may have been "you're a charity, which needs pre-approval" rather than "the Donate button is for nonprofits only". I sent PayPal an email in hopes of getting a clear statement regarding tipjars, but I guess they're quite busy right now...

Re: O_O

[jenny_evergreen]

Please let us know if/when you hear from them! This is very upsetting!

[natasiakith]

I have a Google checkout account, but I've never used it. I *think* it's US, UK, and Australia, but again, I've never used it.

(near) Monopolies. Blearg.

[moonwolf1988.livejournal.com]

Even though I didn't find anything on Paypal itself about their point of view about personal donate buttons for crowdfunders I did find this: http://netprofitstoday.com/blog/thinking-about-using-that-paypal-donate-button-to-your-blog/. It's from 2009 but people have commented on it recently, so I thought it might be interesting for everyone.

I just hope that Paypal clarify everything, and maybe make a new button for bloggers/crowdfunders who earn at least some money via that source if they don't want us to use the donate button.