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How does Paypal Know what item you are selling on Ebay?
 

seriously though

if you have an item that isn't listed in a category and you list the title is generic listing example: "Used Shoes" or just "Red T-shirt" or something non descriptive

how do they know if what you are selling is high risk??? im missing some thing here

Re: How does Paypal Know what item you are selling on Ebay?
 

How about you tell us your story or why your asking.

Re: How does Paypal Know what item you are selling on Ebay?
 

When the customer pays/checks out while payment is initiated, eBay sends pertenent details of the transaction to PayPal. Stuff like customer Name, Address, e-mail, userID, and other details such as category/item description, etc. Probably a lot of other stuff too. PayPal can easily know simply from this, as well as the item # by looking for keywords, etc. Lots of ways they would know what you are selling.

Re: How does Paypal Know what item you are selling on Ebay?
 

They just look at the item listing or the item title

Re: How does Paypal Know what item you are selling on Ebay?
 

You do know that ebay and paypal are basically the same company just split into 2 entities for accounting purposes right?

Re: How does Paypal Know what item you are selling on Ebay?
 

This is not ebay related. I have gotten a warning from paypal even for stuff I am selling in my own online store and those where below 20 $ transactions.

Now here's what I think happened and what happens in the background and this of course also applies for items sold on ebay. There is data transmitted through the paypal API. And the Item Title is part of that data transmitted to paypal. Paypal seem to have bots that scan the title and those bots will raise a red flag if they find something paypal might not like. Then the item or the seller profile will be analysed manually.

I have seen online shops selling high risk and ⊗⊗⊗⊗ items. They use Paypal. But when you checkout with paypal you will see, that they used a trick. They manipulated their checkout module so that instead of the item title only for example the item number is transmitted to paypal. This way, paypal won't become suspicious, even if the seller sells a copy of the newest not yet aired star wars movie.

So I am pretty sure, it's the item title in combination with paypal bots which scan the title for certain words and misspellings.

Re: How does Paypal Know what item you are selling on Ebay?
 

'manipulated their checkout module'... I'm not sure that's even possible without access to the PP system as well as a complex API skill set.

Without know what PP considers 'high risk' I'm not sure this question is all that easy to answer.

And with a billion+ transactions a day, not even a tiny fraction of transactions could be manually reviewed even if flagged by a bot.

Re: How does Paypal Know what item you are selling on Ebay?
 

I was talking about online shops and you can easily manipulate the php code on your side before data is transferred to paypal. I did it myself ofc. You can't do that on ebay. It's just what led me to think that the item title is critical. And this might as well be the case with ebay items as clearly the item title is transfered to paypal.

I am thinking that paypal has a list of critical keywords (like Louis Vuitton and millions more) and the bots scan the item title for these keywords. Other factors will play a role too, especially the age and history of the account.

Probably not every flag raised by the bots will result in manual review, maybe some accounts are closed even without manual review. On other accounts a warning might be sent out and the account holder is asked to reconfirm paypal policies without manual review.

This is just my thinking after I had the aforementioned incident with items from my website. In no way it means it is true, but it makes sense to me.

Re: How does Paypal Know what item you are selling on Ebay?
 

Yeah, there's a certainly a logic to that. :)