PayPal Payment Notifications on Your Phone

Robert Plank

On the Internet, the general rule of thumb is that when someone sends you an e-mail, you're expected to have read it within 24 hours.

If you sell a hands-on product, like a high ticket item or coaching program, you might want to be notified of a sale instantly, even if you're away from the computer, so you can follow-up with your customer within minutes and impress the heck out of them.

This can be done with your web host's existing control panel, requires no programming, AND could be applied to any payment processor like Clickbank, StormPay, 2Checkout, etc. as long as that processor sends you an e-mail after every purchase.

For this you need a cell phone. (Did you know your cell phone most likely ALREADY accepts text messages through e-mail? I didn't until I looked into it.) Figure out your SMS e-mail address:

If your provider is AT&T, your SMS address will end in: mobile.att.net
If your provider is Cingular, your SMS address will end in: mycingular.com
If your provider is Nextel, your SMS address will end in: messaging.nextel.com
If your provider is Qwest, your SMS address will end in: qwestp.com
If your provider is Sprint, your SMS address will end in: messaging.sprintpcs.com
If your provider is T-Mobile, your SMS address will end in: tmomail.net
If your provider is Verizon, your SMS address will end in: vtext.com
If your provider is VoiceStream, your SMS address will end in: voicestream.net

Don't see your carrier in this list? Call them up and find out if you can receive SMS messages through e-mail.

The first part of your SMS e-mail will be your phone number, without any spaces, dashes or parentheses. So if your cell number was (817) 555-1212, that number without all those extra things would just be 8175551212.

Put the two together. So if your number is (817) 555-1212 and your cellular carrier is Verizon, your SMS e-mail is: 8175551212@vtext.com

Send a test e-mail to that address to make sure your phone gets alerted.

Now let's setup an e-mail forwarder just for PayPal notifications. Go into your cpanel and go to the E-Mail section and choose Forwarders (it might be a little different on your web host). Add a forwarder for " paypal@example.com" where example.com is your domain name.

This forwarder should point to your main e-mail address and the SMS e-mail address. Separate them with a comma. So if your main address was something like webmaster@example.com, we would be forwarding paypal@example.com to: webmaster@example.com, 8175551212@vtext.com

Send a test e-mail to your paypal@example.com address and check to make sure the test message gets to both the phone and your regular e-mail address.

Finally, change your notification address in PayPal. Login, go to Profile -> (Account Information - Email), and add an e-mail address like paypal@example.com which will only be used to notify you of payments. Once that's added be sure to hit "Make Primary."

Get a friend to pay you a penny through PayPal. You should get notified via e-mail AND on your phone. Now when you get an order and are at the library or playing in the front room with your kids you can take a minute to call your customer and thank them for the sale, instead of sitting in front of the computer all day.

If you really want to impress a customer, add the ability for them to enter a phone number (it's an option you can choose when you create your payment button).

When you get paged you could check the transaction and see first of all, if they provided a contact phone number, and if they did, check their state or country to make sure you aren't calling in the middle of the night in their timezone.

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