Buying Postage on PayPal

Although I appreciate a buyer sending a PayPal Friend/Family payment for an item I have sold, in order to save me the fees, sometimes I wish they had sent a regular Goods/Services payment instead, especially when the total sale amount and fee are not a lot of money, because it seemed to me for a long time that there was no way to pay for shipping on PayPal unless it was for a business transaction. So a F/F payment meant that I had to find one of the scarce parking spots at my local P.O. and then stand in a long line for the single clerk on duty, in order to buy postage. At times I've even been disgruntled enough at the thought of that process that I refunded the buyer's money and asked them to re-submit it as a regular business payment, which probably was sort of a rude thing for me to do.

However, I learned today that it is possible to just buy postage on PayPal for any shipping, even for a Friend/Family transaction. Some of you probably already knew this, but I didn't. Anyway, all you need to do is sign in to your PayPal account, then go to: https://www.paypal.com/shiplabel/create/
There you can enter your shipping address information, type of shipping, weight, etc., pay for the postage, and print your label. Easy.

I found this out a some time ago because I wanted to be able to pay&print First Class postage online, which you cannot do through USPS website. I logged into PP then entered https://www.paypal.com/shipnow into the url. Just checked and it resolves to the link you provided above. Thanks for sharing this tip.

Thanks for that Greg. I want to print 1st class postage too since I can't get into town every day.

I too have had people send regular payment so I could access first class postage so I appreciate this information!

This is good info - thanks to all for sharing.

Just as a reminder — our policy on DFS is to follow PayPal’s policies. (More information here: https://damnfineshave.com/thread-sticky-...t-payments)
I’m also happy to let PayPal deduct the (usually) small fee in order to have the address fields pre-populated, instead of having to first contact a buyer and then re-enter the information myself.

That being said, the link John posted does come in handy when there’s a need to create a label and there’s no PayPal transaction to base it on. I’ve used it a few times in various situations, and it’s much more straightforward than anything I’ve seen on the USPS website.

Another forum member and I have leant each other gear to test out and I had him send me .25 cents to my account just so I could access the first class labels. This would have been very handy for that.