Getting Customer Phone Numbers With PayPal Payments

By Adam  |  23 Jun 2015 09:00:00

When running a business, it can be quite useful to have a customer's telephone number, that way if you need to urgently contact them about something to do with their order, you can do so. Having a customer's phone number may also come in handy for telemarketing purposes at some point, depending on whether or not telemarketing is a part of your marketing strategy. Regardless, there are many reasons you might want a customer's phone number.

It may be a problem to some, therefore that when PayPal Express is used as the payment gateway the customer's telephone number is not recorded for you. If you do need those phone numbers and PayPal Express is what most of your customers are using, this post has the answer to your problems. If you log in to your PayPal account, a quick change in the settings will mean that you always get the phone numbers from people you receive payments from. When you're on PayPal, you click on your 'Account' and then click on 'Profile' and then after that you should see an option which says 'My Selling Tools'. From there you can get to a section called "Website Preferences" and "Contact Telephone Number" can be found there; it is automatically set to "Off" but you can change it to "On (required field)" or "On (optional field)".

Depending on how important it is to you, "On (optional field)" may be the best option. When the telephone number is mandatory, customers may be wary of later receiving telesales calls. In fact, if the customer has to give out their phone number in order to make a purchase, it's possible they'll abandon the transaction if they'd rather keep their number private; this is the worst case scenario! Having it be optional merely gives the customers a choice and if they think that the package is more likely to reach them if they give out their telephone number (so that unexpected circumstances can be handled on the phone) they may well give it to you anyway, leaving you to do with that information whatever you deem best. It would be wise, however, not to be too intrusive with a customer's phone number, because occasionally telemarketing can have the opposite effect of souring the customer's opinion of the business.