Mass Payments With Paypal – Lower Fees (video)

Do you send money to people using Paypal?  You should consider using the “Mass Pay” functionality to reduce fees for your recipients.

Mass pay is generally used when you want to pay a large group of people (for example, when you are paying your suppliers, affiliates or staff). When you use mass pay, PayPal only charges $1 per payment, as opposed to the usual 2.9-4% in charges it will take out of payments done via text to pay.

To use Mass Pay, you MUST have the following:

1. A paypal Business or Premiere account.  You can’t use Mass Pay with a personal account.
2. Sufficient funds in your paypal account in the currency that you are sending the payment in, PLUS the fee.  So if you’re sending $1000 in USD, you need to have $1001 USD in your paypal balance.  You can’t have $1013 AUD in the account and send payments in USD… but you can convert funds to different currencies in Paypal on an as needed basis.

To Send A Mass Payment

1. Log on to your PayPal account
2. Click “Send Money”
3. Click “Make a Mass Payment”
4. Upload your “payment file” (see below)
5. Enter the subject of the payment and a message if you wish
6. Click “review” and PayPal’s system will look over your file to see if it is correctly formatted. If it is, the payment will be sent.

Here’s a video on how to do it.

[jwplayer config=”standard” mediaid=”1957″]

How to make a “payment file”

PayPal has instructions on their site for how to make a CSV payment file. However, if you are sending only a small amount of payments, it might be easier to enter them into a plain text file. Here’s how:

1. Open up a plain text editor, such as WordPad or NotePad
2. Enter the EMAIL address of the first recipient you wish to pay (be sure it starts flush with the left margin, at the very top of the page)
3. When you’ve entered the email address, do NOT hit the space bar. Instead, press the “Tab” key on your keyboard.
4. Now enter the AMOUNT you wish to pay with decimals, but WITHOUT any currency markings. For example, if you wish to pay $100, put: 100.00
5. When you’ve entered the payment amount, press the “Tab” key again.
6. Now enter the CURRENCY in which you wish to pay. For example For US dollars, enter USD; for British pounds, enter GBP; for Australian Dollars, enter AUD; for Euro’s, enter EUR
7. If you are finished, save the file as a plain text document, and upload to PayPal
8. OR if you have another recipient you wish to add, press the ENTER key to move your cursor to the next line and repeat steps 1-7 for each recipient until you are finished.

Here’s an example of what a file could look like:

[email protected] 100.00        USD

[email protected] 2000.00      USD

[email protected] 5.00   USD

Notice how the lines and decimals do not necessarily line up depending upon the length of each field.

PayPal will ask if you will pay the $1 fee. It’s a nice courtesy to do so if you are paying others, especially when it saves both of you so much in fees.

Thanks to Lynn Serafinn from Spirit Authors for typing up these instructions for me!