From Pay Pal To Blackbaud Merchant Services

Jennifer Kluh

My Foundation set up our Blackbaud Merchant Services account this week and we are transitioning away from using PayPal. Just wondering if anyone else has done the same thing and had some useful tips.?

Madeleine Holdsworth

Not sure what your method will be for transitioning to BBMS. We did that last year and we still have 3 stragglers in PayPal, because the donors have not responded to us to get their cc info (PayPal only keeps the last 4 digits). We didn't have that many donors in PayPal but what we did was reach out to each to let them know our transaction vendor was changing, and asked for their CC info so that we could add the recurring gifts into BBMS and terminate in PayPal. It's a real pain. I haven't tried the PayPal option in BBMS because we really want to just be done with PayPal. If you come up with any better solution, please let me know!

Jennifer Kluh

Thank you so much for your input! We are so done with PayPal also and are excited to use BMS exclusively. ?

Megan Thiel

@Madeleine Holdsworth Why are you not considering PayPal integrated with BBMS? Also, when you download transactions from your business account in PayPal, do you get mailing address information? We are researching the BBMS/PayPal integration and see that we must go into PayPal to pull transactions vs having the information available in BBMS and we want to ensure we have enough information to identify a donor. Thank you.

Rijusiddha Drewett

@Jennifer Kluh we moved away from Paypal as soon as we started using Merchant Services and RE from our old CRM. Paypal was a horrible solution from a technical point as we never got enough information about the donor and they were not good to deal with. We only used it so we could get international regular giving going (we are in the UK and use Direct Debits) and since moving to Merchant Services have dumped Paypal as an option although we still have a few stragglers still on subscriptions.