10 PayPal Life Hacks Every User Should Know
PayPal is a payment platform with a wide range of uses, from exchanging data between individuals to centralizing payments for purchases from merchants across the internet. You can also use PayPal for other financial purposes, such as receiving direct deposits, accumulating savings, and earning rewards. Here are 10 tips and tricks to help you manage your finances most effectively with PayPal.
Add PayPal offers to get double the credit card rewards.
If you use a credit card with a loyalty program as your preferred payment method with PayPal, you already earn points, miles, or cash back on your purchases. PayPal also offers a loyalty program, so you can add offers to your account and earn extra cash back when you pay with PayPal. You’ll find them on the “Offers” page —just click the plus sign to add them to your wallet.
Remove merchant billing tokens to stop ongoing charges.
If you’ve set up recurring or automatic payments through PayPal as your preferred payment method, you can view which merchants are connected to your PayPal account and cancel these payments in your settings. This will prevent unwanted charges and allow you to cancel subscriptions you’ve forgotten about. You can see which merchants have access to automatic payments under Settings > Payments > Subscriptions & Saved Businesses or Automatic Payments . (Note that merchants listed as active don’t necessarily charge you on a recurring basis.) Select a merchant and click “Stop Paying with PayPal.” This feature also makes PayPal a good choice for signing up for free trials that you might forget to cancel.
Compare your activity feed to identify phishing emails.
PayPal is a frequent target for phishing scams: I’ve written repeatedly about scammers posing as PayPal users and sending fake purchase notifications in an attempt to steal personal information or distribute malware. In many cases, these emails come from legitimate PayPal addresses, making them difficult to spot. If you receive a suspicious purchase receipt, you can simply log in to your PayPal account and check your “Recent Activity” feed, which displays all your PayPal transactions. If you don’t see the purchase in question there, you’ll know it’s a scam and can delete the email.
Set your credit card as your default payment method to protect your bank account.
When setting up PayPal, you can link a bank account and/or a credit or debit card as payment methods. If you add a bank account, be sure to also add a credit card and set it as your preferred payment method. This will not only protect your bank account from accidental withdrawals and overdrafts, but also provide you with all the benefits of your credit card, including purchase protection and rewards. Go to your Wallet , select the card you want to use as your default, and click “Set as Preferred.” Please note that if you have recurring payments set up with individual merchants, you will need to select these preferred payment methods separately in the Automatic Payments settings.
Make your account visible to Venmo to make payments between platforms.
There are several popular peer-to-peer payment platforms, including Venmo and Cash App , so there may be situations where you need to send or receive funds from or to someone who doesn’t have PayPal. If they use Venmo, this isn’t a problem, as Venmo and PayPal are compatible as long as users have made their accounts searchable on both platforms. To make yourself visible to Venmo users, go to Settings > Data & Privacy > Search Privacy and enable “People on Venmo.” This will allow them to find you by phone number. You can also search for users’ phone numbers in PayPal to find their Venmo accounts (if they’ve enabled this feature).
Turn off profile discovery to keep your information private.
On the other hand, you may want to keep your PayPal profile private and prevent people from searching for you on the service to send or request funds. You can disable profile discovery, which will prevent people from finding you by your name, username, email, or phone number. Under Settings > Data & Privacy > Search Privacy, disable the “Personal Profile Information” option .
Split the transaction balance to use the last remaining funds on the gift card.
Prepaid gift cards are like free money, but once you’ve spent most of the balance, it can be difficult to use the remaining few dollars, as many merchants don’t allow you to split the purchase between multiple payment methods. However, if you add the card to PayPal, you can split the transaction and spend a small amount that would otherwise go unused. This option is available to merchants who accept PayPal. After selecting this option, select the associated payment methods you want to split the balance between and enter a specific amount for each card.
Create a pool to accumulate funds to achieve a common goal together with a group.
If you’re planning a trip, dinner, or gift that several people are contributing to, you can create a PayPal pool, allowing everyone to contribute to a single balance in advance, instead of transferring money back and forth after the purchase. In the pool, you can see who has contributed and how much toward the shared goal—and once the goal is reached, the funds can be used from your PayPal account or transferred to the person making the purchase. Under “Send & Request,” click “Merge Money” > “Start Pooling” to invite others to your pool.
Turn off data sharing to prevent targeted advertising based on purchases.
There are several other important privacy settings that prevent PayPal from tracking and sharing your purchase data, which could then be used for things like targeted advertising. Under Settings > Data & Privacy , select Manage Cookies and uncheck the box next to Marketing . Then, go to the Personalized Advertising section and turn off the toggle. Finally, under Personalized Shopping , disable PayPal’s ability to share products, offers, and rewards with participating merchants.
Use Smart Route to automatically save money from your paycheck as it goes into your bank account.
If you find it difficult to save after your paycheck, it’s helpful to allocate funds in advance before you have the opportunity to spend them. If you receive direct deposits via PayPal, you can set up automatic payday splits between your PayPal balance for regular spending, PayPal Savings, and PYUSD (PayPal cryptocurrency rewards). Your savings can be used to automatically top up your PayPal balance when it gets too low. For the mobile version of the app, you need to enable Smart Route: in the app, tap the PayPal balance tile, go to PayPal Smart Route, and follow the instructions to set up direct deposit routing.