Earn Easy Affiliate Commissions With The Weird Paypal Merchant Bonus Referral Program

Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes

It’s hard to believe everybody doesn’t have a PayPal account, but some people don’t, and many with good reasons. Many people starting online businesses may have been buying stuff for years online without having a PayPal account. Since PayPal allows purchasing through it with a credit card but without an account login, many people will just do that when presented with PayPal as the only payment option.

I can relate, because I am account-creation averse myself and for a time had a running dispute with PayPal that prevented me from using my account but did not prevent me from buying stuff with PayPal by paying without an account login.

You can earn commissions when people sign-up for merchant accounts through your referral link. The commission has limits, but it’s probably worth setting it up if you market, as I do, to people who want to start or grow online businesses.

PayPal has a referral program that pays commissions but they make it really hard to find your link.

I had a PayPal account with a referral link a while back, but I closed it and stopped using it and opened another… I had forgotten about the referrer program and I recently stumbled on an opportunity to earn from it so I thought, “well, I’ll just get a referral link for my present account”

First - I think you need to have a business or merchant account and it probably needs to be verified. Business accounts are free and verification is free, but you’ll have to jump through a few hoops and getting it done may take a couple of days.

Second - Paypal’s instructions for getting the referral link, if you can locate the instructions at all, are wildly inaccurate. At their clearest they tell you you can find your referrer link at the bottom of ANY Paypal page. This is a lie, because as soon as you login to your PayPal account, you’ll find the referrer menu item at the bottom disappears. This is a catch-22 because the only way PayPal could give you a referrer link is if you were logged-in.

I suspect PayPal has made this hard to figure-out in order to discourage people from using it to earn commissions, or maybe it’s just a symptom of the Peter Principle at work or something.

Here’s a work-around. I have not seen this described anywhere online. Every blog or resource I found was either out of date or just dumbly parroted what PayPal says in pages pertaining to the referrer program.

Here is a workable method (as of August 2010) for getting your PayPal referral link:

• Step 1. Login to your Paypal verified business account.
• Step 2. Type “referrals” (without quotes) into the search box at the top and press enter.
• Step 3. Completing step 2 takes you to a search results page with one results for “Login – Paypal”. Click that link and it takes you to a business account page that looks a little different from the usual page you’re used to seeing.
• Step 4. Repeat step 2 (really – you have to do it again) Type “referrals” (without quotes) into the search box at the top and press enter.
• Step 5. This should take you to a search results page. All the search results are pretty useless for getting your link, but if you scroll to the bottom you will find a little menu item for “referrals” and if you click on that you’ll be taken to a page that gives you a custom referrer link.

…

Oh – and here’s my link if you don’t have a PayPal account: Click HERE to sign-up for a Paypal business account

The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog.