In sad but perhaps apt news given that it’s happening on 4/20, PayPal Key is getting smoked.
PayPal sent out an email to customers yesterday advising that its popular PayPal Key (also known as PPK) feature will be ending on April 20, 2022:
PayPal is discontinuing the PayPal Key virtual card feature. Starting April 20, 2022, you will no longer be able to use your PayPal Key Virtual Cards. This includes the ability to see the virtual card number, and any attempted online purchases will be declined. Please be sure to update any saved payments before then.
In case you’re not familiar with PayPal Key, it’s a virtual Mastercard debit card that’s backed by the credit card of your choosing. That had all kinds of potential, but many of those avenues got closed off early on.
Some hit Plastiq pretty hard due to the fact that debit cards had a lower fee. Plastiq caught on to that and so stopped allowing usage of PayPal Key to make payments.
American Express wasn’t a big fan of PayPal Key either, so a few weeks after Plastiq stopped accepting it as a payment method, Amex stopped allowing you to use American Express cards as the backing card for all PPK payments.
Another popular use case in the early days was paying Federal taxes. Paying taxes by credit card comes with a ~1.9% fee, whereas debit card payments have a flat ~$2.50 fee. For someone paying a $5,000 tax bill, paying a $2.50 fee rather than ~$95 was a no-brainer seeing as you’d still earn the same credit card rewards. Federal tax payment processors didn’t like that either, so towards the end of 2020 that option was ixnayed too.
There were occasionally other issues too. Some people were unable to set up a PayPal Key in the first place. Others were able to set one up but subsequently had issues when using it; they deleted that Key to set up a new one, but weren’t able to get a new Key.
That’s not to say that PayPal Key was no longer fit for purpose. There have been various uses for it that have proven to be beneficial for people. For example, the Slide app offers an additional 1%-2% cashback when prefunding your account. 1% is offered for prefunding via credit card and 2% is given when prefunding by debit card. Seeing as PayPal Key functions as a debit card, you could prefund your Slide balance using PPK to earn 2% cashback without having to forgo credit card rewards.
It’s sad that PayPal Key is not long for this world, but at least PayPal has given us all a heads up that we have four weeks left to use it rather than simply shutting it down with no notice.
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How to shut down Paypal Keys? I really need help to do this cuz i have like 20 Bitcoin Wallets and i need to transfer them to Paypal but i dont want to get locked from coinbase. Please Help
Hi. My question is, how do I pay for things using PayPal now? I usually used the key for mobile fast food orders and now I have no idea how to use PayPal for this purpose. Plus square units won’t scan the QR/barcodes from PayPal.
Now I can’t use Sezzle to make my payments, when I had a good standing account. Apparently PayPal debit cards are through green dot type banks, now (so many people won’t accept PayPal
Debit cards now ‍♀️
Their loss, I guess… because some of those other banks are alittle better than the “System” lol
Stephen, are their any alternatives (BILT maybe)?
The ability to change the funding source on the back end (like when trying to meet a new SUB) instead of having to visit every site individually was really convenient!
The only option I can think of which would let you change the funding source on the backend is the Curve card. That has a waitlist at the moment though, so it might be a little while before you’d be able to get your hands on it – here’s more about it https://frequentmiler.com/curve-is-here-and-its-real-it-wont-rule-them-all-but-itll-rule-player-2s-wallet/
Thank you for the insight Stephen, we really appreciate it!
darn. Amazon doesn’t take PayPal so the key has been handy to use.
Ok I just recently had a use for this thing and now it’s over smh
PayPal hit the death nail partnering with Synchrony Bank………………….
Most of the best uses haven’t worked for m depsite experimenting but the one thing that has worked has been car payments. I have a really good interest on my car loan so it’s practically free money but I think I will probably now just go ahead and pay it off over the next couple of weeks to get the points.
I’m looking for all people involved in stealing my God
All righty, I’m loading up on popcorn, ready for the dirt to be dished out on all the angles everyone was working with this.
Someone is going to get real dirty.
I loved it for category bonuses. Had one last year for Marriott–10x points on Paypal up to 50,000 points. Discover and Chase often run quarterly Paypal bonuses (Discover is 3Q this year–too late). So easy–everything got charged to Paypal Key. Will really miss this one.
And all you thieves are alike you miss anything that you get for free and steal
I’m sure you have never done anything that could be considered stealing, of which this is not a case. This is simply optimizing the resources available to best serve your needs. People do this everyday, especially now that the wealth gap is widening. I have a felling you never had to struggle for anything in your life, if you did we might see more compassion and less overbearing judgement from you.
And just for the record this feature was popular for many reasons, I enjoyed the security of being able to use a different card at each retailer or even each transaction. I would guarantee this idea comes around again if not multiple incarnations from different vendors.
I was using it for over the phone payments, changing the CVV code after each use. Now I can only do this with capital one Virtual card inguess
Crap! This was as good if not better than Redbird.
Can you elaborate Jay? Key is on death row so might as well 🙂