How do you manage your PayPal invoices?

Need an efficient way to print PayPal labels and more...

[tomld2]

I receive around 100 paypal payments per day and I am looking for a way to automate some of the tasks associated with these payments. Such as autoresponding to the paypal emails, saying we recieved their payment and will ship their item soon. Plus a way to bulk print shipping addresses from these paypal emails or invoices.

Currently I manually respond to each email saying we received it. I also copy and paste the shipping addresses from each email manually and print from Word. I manage all the emails through Outlook Express.

Does anyone have advice of how I could automate these tasks and cut down the time it takes to complete them?

Thanks
Tom

[sun818]

> autoresponding to the paypal emails

You can set up Mail rule that replies to each incoming Paypal payment notification. You want set up a rule based on a unique message header like "Return-Path: <[e-mail]>". Reason is that if your message rule is based on subject or body text, your client may receive another auto-reply when they reply to your auto-message.

> Plus a way to bulk print shipping addresses from these paypal emails or invoices.

Under Paypal > History > Download My History, you can generate a CSV (comma separated value) file called Download.csv that will contain the transaction details including mailing address. Unfortunately, mailing address is generated as one field. This means name, address, city, state, zip is one field. Its kind of a pain to try to separate this one field into multiple lines. I've complained to Paypal many times to make each line a separate field but I don't know if they will ever make that change.

Another workaround is to use a clipboard copy/paste manager (i.e. ClipMate) that will keep a history. When you are ready to print your labels, you can paste the appropriate mailing address you copied on demand.

[tomld2]

The problem with the message rules for an Outlook Express autoresponder is it sends the response message as an attachment, rather than in the body of the email. Which to me is unacceptable. Is there any work around for OE to reply with an actual message?

Thanks

[sun818]

Would this be the cause of your attachments in the auto-replies?

From the Help file:
Using HTML Formatting
"When you create messages using HTML formatting, only e-mail programs that support HTML can read the formatting. If the recipient's e-mail or news reading program cannot read HTML, the message is displayed as plain text with an HTML file attached."

I suggest tweaking with your OE settings and see if receive different results.

In terms of automated solutions, there many more free and commercial solutions written for Outlook but not for Outlook Express.

[tomld2]

The way the rule works, is you write an email and save it as an eml file. It then autoresponds with that eml file as an attachment. I just don't see anyway around that. I have Outlook, but from what I remember, I liked Express better. I'll have to take a look at Outlook again.

[sun818]

You can also set an auto-responder on the mail server level. Any decent web host will let you configure processing for incoming e-mail. You can be CCed on the replies to know the auto-responder is working.

[bootytp]

The way to do what you want is using Paypal's IPN (Instant Payment Notification) feature. IPN sends a special request to your web server and you can use it to populate a database of your customers information.

I use it to automatically send out payment recieved emails, shipping notification emails, and to print out invoices and envelopes.

If you are not a programmer, this will be difficult to accomplish however.

[tomld2]

I found out a good solution for the non-programmers. I fixed my outlook autoresponder. You must create your message as a TXT file rather than a EML file for it not to be sent as an attachment. Then I just download my PayPal logs with the date range I need. Next open it in Excel, delete all the rows but the address row (address row also contains the name). Close the Excel file and open it in Notepad. Copy the addresses, paste them in Frontpage, go to the source code, replace all commas with a line break HTML code, go back to the normal view, copy the edited addresses, paste them back in Notepad and save the file. Then open Word or Works go to the mail merge function, select your address TXT file and import your addresses. Click print and it'll ask you if you want to print all of the addresses.

I know it sounds like a lot of work, but it literally takes a few minutes and then your automatically printing a few hundred labels.

-Tom

[nakulgoyal]

wow....it seems you found a custom solution!