Stopping PayPal

We used to use PayPal to take payments for our own-brand products. It was cheap and worked pretty well. However, we decided that we would rather use a payment processor that did more of the work for us, so we switched to Plimus. Unfortunately we had links to a PayPal order form hard coded in the setup program. That was a bad idea.

It was easy enough to create new setups containing the new links. The problem is that old files lurk and linger in the darker recesses of cyberspace and you have no control over them. Those out of date links still exist. With PayPal, you can't put up a page to say "No, this order link is not valid any more."

I tried changing the email address we use for PayPal. But now, we just get emails to the old address from PayPal saying: "Fred Jones wants to send you money. Open an account to accept it." I guess they treat this as a marketing opportunity, to get new customers. But for us it's just a nuisance. It's also a bit worrying that if you try to send someone money with PayPal and use the wrong address, the recipient might take up the invitation to open an account and claim your cash! I think that if the email address is not already registered with PayPal, it should refuse the transaction.

Obviously, as I said, it's a bad idea to code PayPal purchase links directly into any piece of software. Better to use links to a page on the website, which you can redirect anywhere you want, whenever you want. You live and learn.

But it's also worth noting that you really can't stop anyone buying anything you ever sold using PayPal, even expired special offers, as long as they are still in possession of a valid PayPal URL. My advice would be never to code a PayPal link into any web page either, which could be cached by a search engine or stored in someone's browser cache. Better to use a "click counter" redirection script to completely conceal the URL.

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