Good morning everyone, I hope your week is going well.  There have been a ton of eBay gift card deals from PayPal Digital Gifts (PPDG) and SVM from the last few days and I have purchased $2,700+ worth of gift cards in the last 3 days.  Inevitably, I get stuck in the infamous “PayPal Verification Loop” where you need to verify/confirm your identity before you can pay with your PayPal account.  If you are not buying thousands of gift cards per day, you should not see the “Verify Your Account” message.

Unfortunately, if you do see the message, you will need to verify your identity before you can pay with PayPal.  The easiest option is to confirm via text message where PayPal sends you a text asking if you are trying to complete a purchase of $XXX.XX and you respond with “1”, which means yes.  Yes, yes, yes, a million times yes!!

Unfortunately that still doesn’t always work and you will get an error message on the following screen that says your payment option (PayPal) isn’t available.

If you are determined to complete the purchase, you can try buying on eBay mobile on your smartphone or through the eBay app.  Unfortunately, that is no guarantee either and you may see a similar payment error message.

I found a work around yesterday when I was attempting to buy 5 $100 Babies R Us gift cards that were on sale for $85 each (5 x $85 = $425).  I tried buying 5 gift cards but always got stuck in the PayPal verification loop, so I tried again for 3 gift cards and the purchase went through fine!  I then tried to buy another 2 gift cards but got stuck in the PayPal verification loop, so I tried to buy 1 gift card and that went through fine too!  Lastly, I needed just 1 more gift card, so I tried to buy 1 more gift card and that purchase went through fine as well!  Lesson learned, if you can break up your purchase into multiple orders, you might get around the PayPal verification loop issue.

Here are my 3 gift card orders from my eBay account.  The first order is on the bottom, second order is in the middle, and last order is at the top.

Here are my 3 PayPal receipts.  If you look closely in the upper right corner, you will see the timestamp for all 3 orders.  The first order was placed at 9:35am, second order was placed at 9:37am, and last order was placed at 9:38am.

As you can see, it took me about 1-2 minutes per order which is much faster than trying to get out of the PayPal verification loop which sometimes takes 5-10 minutes.  If you are fast and don’t mind placing orders separately, I would recommend that work around.  If that still doesn’t work for you, you might be out of luck and need to wait 1-2 days for your PayPal account to “cool down” and then you should be able to buy with PayPal again.

If you have any questions about the PayPal verification loop, please leave a comment below.  Have a great day everyone!