I'm going to say I'm not new to ebay or paypal but this has me completely stumped. In the past I have been able to apply the money that was in my paypal account to ebay purchases and then fund the rest with my credit card. I've just won an auction today and am trying to pay for it using the money that is currently in my paypal account which covers half of the purchase, and then put the rest on my amex. The issue is for some reason it's not allowing me to apply the amount in the account and is trying to put the full amount on my amex. I've since deleted the credit card from my paypal account to see if that would work but now I get this message when I try to check out through ebay "To make this purchase, please add a debit or credit card to your PayPal account." Did they recently change something? Why is this so difficult? I do surveys which pay through paypal and I use that money to fund fun purchases so I definitely wasn't anticipating having to put the full amount on my credit card and I do not want to link my bank account to my paypal account to transfer the money.
Need help with ebay purchase and paying from my paypal account.
- Thread starter ladyash
- Start date
I sent them an email so hopefully they respond within 24 hours like it says otherwise I will be calling. I was hoping to use my amex for the points since I'm saving for travel! The problem is because it's in foreign currency it's showing that it will apply the full amount in GBP to my Amex which I'm not wanting to do because it's a new card and I have no idea the conversion rates! Might try with my Visa since at least I know that rate is 2.5%.
The funds are there and available. I do surveys for some spare fun money and let that all add up until there is enough there to almost cover my ebay purchases. I just bought something from the UK so I don't have enough funds to cover the currency conversion to Canadian dollars so I will need to use a credit card but would like to first use the balance I have in paypal!
Well I think I figured it out! Seems that it only happens when my amex card is linked to my paypal. I recently switched my old visa out for a new type of visa and an amex card dividing the amount I was pre-approved for equally between the cards. I thought I would link the amex up to the account because the travel points would be nice to earn on online purchases since I still find not a lot of businesses want to take amex. I deleted the amex and hooked up my new visa and as long as I let paypal do the currency conversion for me it took the amount from my account first before charging the remaining to my visa. When I had both cards linked to my paypal account it would automatically select the amex one with no way for me to change it to my visa. Not sure if this is part of ebays new checkout system or what but it's really annoying and inconvenient since this took me way too long to pay for a purchase that should have been straight forward.
Is it possible that Amex has some type of requirement that the entire payment must be charged to their card and that payments can't be split?
No idea...It's the first time trying to use my amex online. Well paypal was helpful. The email they sent me was like "this is an ebay issue here is how you contact ebay". So whatever at least I paid last night with my Visa which allowed me to apply the balance in my account first. I didn't want to leave the seller waiting for days for payment while trying to figure out the reason it doesn't work with amex.
Not with PP funds anyway - I've often split purchases between leftover PP funds and my AmEx.
