Payment Setup Checklist for PayPal

To access the Payment Setup Checklist, go to the Settings section of your Dashboard and select Bank & Payments from the sidebar. The checklist is located in the Overview tab.

Learn more about what the checklist includes by reading the sections below.

Starting the process

After selecting this step of your Payment Setup Checklist, you will be asked to Start the verification process. You must complete the process within 30 minutes, so be sure to have your materials ready. You will be taken to PayPal’s secure portal to complete the process.

Your PayPal account

You will have the option to enter credentials for a verified PayPal account with a bank account attached or create a new PayPal account during the verification process (if you’re creating a new PayPal account, make sure you have all relevant business information ready).

If you create a PayPal account without using the FareHarbor Dashboard, please confirm that you select the correct processor country by selecting the flag icon in the bottom-right of the PayPal signup window. If you do not select the correct processor country during setup, you will need to create an entirely new PayPal account from scratch.

Finishing the process

Either way, you’ll need to follow the given steps to ensure your PayPal account is properly linked to your FareHarbor Dashboard. This will include things like allowing permission for FareHarbor to link to your PayPal account, agreeing to any relevant terms of service, or verifying your email (if required).

When you are finished and select Done, you will be redirected back to your Payment Setup Checklist in FareHarbor, which will be green to indicate the completion of the process.

What it looks like

Your customers will now see the PayPal payment method when completing the checkout process. Selecting this option will open a pop-up of PayPal’s secure payment portal. When they have completed their payment, they will be taken back to your site’s confirmation page. The payment method will be shown as “PayPal” on their confirmation emails, receipts, and bank statements.

When you view your payments in PayPal, you’ll be able to see all the Transaction Details, which includes:

• Customer name
• Transaction date
• PayPal Transaction ID
• Order Details that show:
  • FareHarbor item name
  • Date of booking
  • Booking start time
  • Booking ID
  • FareHarbor URL to the booking in your Dashboard

In addition to connecting to your bank account, we highly recommend that you manually add money to your PayPal account balance as well as add a credit card to your PayPal account. Because money cannot be pulled automatically from your attached bank account or credit card, manually adding funds to your PayPal account ensures you are always able to refund your customers, if needed. Your PayPal balance should be an amount you feel is sufficient to process the typical amount of refunds you need to each day. You can always add money to your account at any time.

To have the best experience using PayPal with FareHarbor, the following steps are recommended:

1. Add and verify a bank account in PayPal.
2. Complete Know Your Customer (KYC) validation.

Completing these steps helps prevent holds from PayPal and ensures you can take payments quickly and easily.

PayPal prioritizes protecting their clients to ensure that their platform remains as safe and secure as possible. As such, there may be scenarios where a PayPal transaction is put on hold or in a pending status immediately. Learn more about when this happens and what actions you can take to ensure timely, secure payment.

While using PayPal with FareHarbor, we want to help prepare you for any disputes that may occur. To help you successfully process disputes, here are some examples of what is considered compelling evidence that a customer actually went on your item.

Examples of Compelling Evidence for Intangible Goods

How soon will I start receiving payments after completing the Payment Setup Checklist?

You can start accepting payments as soon as you have completed the Payment Setup Checklist and ensured that your PayPal account is ready to receive payments. Make sure to log into your PayPal account to complete any supplemental tasks, such as verifying your email.

Once a customer makes a booking using PayPal, the funds will be moved directly to your PayPal account. You are able to hold those funds as a reserve or transfer them to a PayPal connected bank account. FareHarbor does not hold any PayPal funds in escrow.

How do I process refunds?

You should process all refunds through your FareHarbor Dashboard. Once processed, you will be able to see the status of the refund throughout your Dashboard.

If you have accidentally processed a refund through your PayPal dashboard, you should create a custom refund to reflect it in your FareHarbor Dashboard. Though this will not fix slight discrepancies you may see in reports due to processing your refund in PayPal, using a custom refund avoids potential errors and ensures that your FareHarbor Dashboard correctly displays the transaction as refunded.

What if I get a dispute?

If you receive a dispute on a PayPal payment, you will receive an email from PayPal notifying you of the dispute and requesting your response. You must respond within the timeframe indicated or the refund will be automatically processed in the customer’s favor as per PayPal’s policy.

Why did my customer’s booking get automatically refunded?

Occasionally, PayPal will set a transaction as “pending” in order to ensure that the payment isn’t fraudulent. When this happens, your FareHarbor Dashboard won’t create a booking and automatically refunds the customer’s PayPal payment.

Whether a customer calls in about their refunded booking or you reach out directly to a customer whose payment you believe to be legitimate, you can ask them to try booking again with a different payment method to complete the transaction.

Can I run reports on PayPal payments?

Because PayPal monitors fee and tax information specific to certain countries and regions, you must run reports through PayPal’s portal to accurately reflect that information. Read more about reporting with PayPal.

Why isn’t my verification working?

Sometimes, you may need to add additional information in order to complete your PayPal verification successfully. Here are some common statuses and extra steps you may see in your Dashboard:

• Please confirm your email address to receive payments: This message means that you still need to confirm the email address that is associated with your PayPal account. You must confirm your email address to verify your PayPal account. Confirm your email address by locating the confirmation email sent to you by PayPal and following all associated instructions.
• You currently cannot receive payments due to a restriction on your PayPal account: This message means that there is a hold on your PayPal account that must be resolved through PayPal’s website in order for you to use the PayPal account with your FareHarbor Dashboard. You can complete any associated steps by logging into your PayPal account directly.
• PayPal account country invalid: In order for PayPal to work with your FareHarbor Dashboard, the country associated with your PayPal account must be the same as the country associated with your FareHarbor Dashboard. Reach out to FareHarbor Support to resolve this issue.
• PayPal permissions not granted: This message means that you have not added the correct permissions on your PayPal Dashboard to work with FareHarbor. Reach out to PayPal Support and ask them to grant FareHarbor the correct permissions in your PayPal account.

There are several steps required to make sure a client’s Dashboard is all set to accept payments with PayPal. Each step in the process ensures that everything is correctly set up to process payments.

Overall, a client requires the following to properly use PayPal to process payments that show on their FareHarbor Dashboard:

1. PayPal is enabled on their FareHarbor Dashboard.
2. Their PayPal account is linked to the FareHarbor Dashboard.

3. That PayPal account is verified in PayPal’s system.

   If a client is using a pre-existing PayPal account for this process, chances are that the account is already verified and they won’t have to complete this step.

1. Enable PayPal on the Dashboard

If you are creating a new company, select “PayPal” under the Payment Processor dropdown on the company form (Note: You will only see this option if the processor country and currency is on the list of supported combinations in the table below).

If you are editing an existing company:

1. Navigate to “Advanced company settings”.
2. In “General”, select “PayPal” under the Payment Processor section (Note: You will only see this option if the processor country and currency is on the list of supported combinations in the table below).
3. Select Save.

If you have any suggestions or questions about this table, please let us know.

2. Client completes the Payment Setup Checklist

After PayPal has been enabled on the company’s Dashboard, they will need to complete the Payment Setup Checklist. This process is entirely hosted by PayPal, and selecting Start on the Payment Setup Checklist will take the client to PayPal’s secure portal to complete the process. This process properly links a PayPal account with a FareHarbor Dashboard.

For clients with an existing, verified PayPal account, completing the steps in this portal will likely take care of all the steps required to accept payments on their FareHarbor Dashboard.

3. Additional steps required to receive payments (if applicable)

Clients have the option to create a new PayPal account within the PayPal-hosted Payment Setup Checklist portal. For clients that do create a new PayPal account during this process, there will be at least one additional step: verify their email address.

All PayPal accounts require a verified email address, and if a client creates an account using this portal, they will need to verify their email address in addition to completing the Payment Setup Checklist to ensure they are ready to properly receive payments.

Limited Account

During the onboarding process within PayPal, an account may be “limited”. A limited account means that you won’t be able to do certain things with your PayPal account. For example, you might not be able to send or withdraw money.

What to do to fix this

• Go to the Resolution Center.
• Click Go to Account Limitations.
• Next to each step required to remove the limitation, click Resolve and follow the steps to provide that information.

Releasing payments on hold

• If the held payment is for a service or intangible item (e.g. piano lessons, e-book), update the order status on your PayPal account and you’ll get your money within 7 days after verification.
  • Once you update the order status: order processed, the buyer(customer) receives an email notifying them that you entered the shipment tracking information for this transaction (if applicable). The email includes the tracking number (if applicable), order status, and shipping company (if applicable).
  • Your funds will be released 1 day after we confirm that your item was delivered (if there’s a tracking number).
  • Your buyer will be prompted to let us know if they have received their order. Once your buyer confirms that they have received the order, your funds will be released instantly.
  • If you do not complete the above steps, your money will be available 21 days after the purchase was completed.

Adding a bank account

If you are unable to add a bank account, it could be because of one of these options:

• The bank account is already linked to another PayPal account.
• Your PayPal account is limited.
• The name on your bank account needs to match the name on your PayPal account.

Withdrawing money from PayPal to your bank account

• A transfer to a bank account typically completes in 1 business day, but it may take longer depending on your bank’s clearing process.
• We only support transfers in local currency. So, if you have a PayPal account in England (GBP), but want to transfer money to your bank account in Germany (EUR), you may be subject to cross border conversion fees.
• Some banks may charge fees for electronic funds transfers. Please contact your bank directly for more information.

PayPal Support

• Go to the Contact Us page.
• Choose the topic and subtopic that best match your reason for contacting us.
• Select Message us near the bottom of the page. (You’ll be prompted to log in if you haven’t already done so).

Though PayPal operates much the same way as Stripe does in the Dashboard, there are a few minor differences that are worth noting.

Read our internal page comparing all our payment processors.

Affiliates will need to handle invoices outside of FareHarbor since we are unable to do direct debits from either an affiliate’s or a charter’s bank account. Since Dashboards with PayPal do not have bank accounts affiliated with them (they only have PayPal accounts linked to them), the Dashboard doesn’t have the access that would allow direct bank debits.

The following three scenarios address how payments will work when using PayPal:

1. PayPal-only Charter + Stripe Affiliate: The affiliate company will need to take the payment for the booking and have the charter company invoice them.
2. Stripe Charter + PayPal-only Affiliate: The charter company will take the payment for the booking using their Stripe card entry fields, and have the affiliate invoice them.
3. PayPay-only Charter and Affiliate: Custom in-store payments will need to be set up to record payment since neither charter nor affiliate can accept card payments using their FareHarbor Dashboard.

Clients in the following countries will only be able to connect a US-based bank account to their PayPal account if they wish their deposits to go directly into a bank account. Alternatively, they are able to connect a Visa debit card to their PayPal dashboard to facilitate payouts. This Visa debit card does not need to be US-based:

Antigua & Barbuda, Albania, Algeria, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Egypt, Fiji, Grenada, St. Kitts & Nevis, St. Lucia, Malawi, New Caledonia, French Polynesia, Palau, Seychelles, Turks & Caicos Islands, Trinidad & Tobago

For further information and restrictions please go to this page on the PayPal website.

Almost all errors will be due to something triggered on the PayPal side. Though we can’t help directly with these issues, we may be able to add additional context for clients, and point them in the right direction for their issue.

Setup

• For French Polynesian clients, it’s not possible to link a Polynesian bank account to PayPal (PayPal doesn’t accept their usual bank codes). There are two options for Polynesian clients:
  • They can create a Euro PayPal account in France (this is the process for Polynesian Stripe clients anyway).
  • They can use a VISA credit or debit card to set up the account.
• Clients will have to accept the “permission granted” notice on PayPal’s end to ensure FareHarbor has appropriate permissions. They should have completed this step if they properly completed the Payment Setup Checklist, but should always be verified if they’re experiencing a problem.

After setup

• The following issues will require a client to contact PayPal Support:

  • Any problems with payouts and disputes must be resolved with PayPal.
  • Payments must be marked as ‘receivable’ on the PayPal side. FareHarbor has no control over that, but we can diagnose it and notify clients when it needs attention.

  • If a client’s PayPal account is flagged:

    Note: PayPal will always send a notification email if there is a problem with a PayPal account. Please ensure that clients always check the email they use on their PayPal account for any communication (they might need to check spam).

  • This means that PayPal has found something suspicious on their account, like suspicious transactions, and has restricted the account somehow to prevent fraud.

  • PayPal has different levels of limitations (like restricting an account to receiving money but not sending out, totally locking down an account, etc).
  • In every case, a client must act! PayPal will always send an email notification about these. Clients must follow the steps indicated in PayPal’s communication (usually this includes either uploading documentation or contacting PayPal Support).
• If a client accidentally refunds in PayPal (which they shouldn’t be doing, see above), they will need to go to the booking in FareHarbor > Advanced > Custom refund > Refund and refund the exact same amount manually to the newly created type “PayPal Refund”.

Changing PayPal Accounts

Though typically a client cannot change the PayPal account associated with their FareHarbor Dashboard, there is one exception scenario.

If a client’s Dashboard has NO bookings and NO payments on their Dashboard, it is technically possible to reset their customer verification information, which allows them to use a different PayPal account. Some reasons a client would need to do this are:

• Client added the wrong PayPal account initially
• Client created a new PayPal account that they would like to use instead of the previously added account

If a Dashboard has NO bookings and NO payments and would like to change their PayPal account, please reach out to #payment_operations on Slack.