How to Find the Email Address of a Buyer or Payer on Paypal

How to Find a Buyer's Email Address on Paypal
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Every so often you may want to find a buyer’s email address on Paypal because for some reason the email notification you get from Paypal doesn’t have it. This is true, for example, when somebody uses your paypal.me link. Unlike nearly all other, if not all other, payment notifications which you get from Paypal, when somebody sends you money through your paypal.me link, the notification doesn’t include the payor’s email address. And if you are like us, you want to thank the person who sent you the payment, after all it’s the polite thing to do. Here’s how to go directly to that transaction’s page to get that email address, and avoid a few steps in the process.

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Now, of course, you can log into Paypal, go to “all transactions”, and search for the transaction, but that takes a whole bunch of steps, and is a hassle if you have to do it more than occasionally, and especially if you have to do several at the same time. Plus you can’t search for it by email address (which is usually the easiest way to do it), because hey, if you had that you wouldn’t need to be searching!

The typical way to get at this information involves many, many steps. First of course is to log in to Paypal. Side note: you do use two-factor authentication (also known as “2FA”) with Paypal, right? If not, you absolutely should, as Paypal is one of the most targeted financial services sites out there in terms of hackers trying to compromise and get into your account, and 2FA is one of the best ways to protect yourself against your account being compromised. Read how to set up two-factor authentication for Paypal and other places here.

Ok, so already you have taken two steps (log into Paypal, get the 2FA code, then actually log in and access your account). Next you have to click on ‘Activity’, then click on ‘All transactions’. (4 steps so far.) Next you have to copy some unique identifying piece of data from the email from Paypal, or the Paypal invoice or receipt, that you have (you know, the reason that you are trying to find the person’s email address), so that you can use that unique piece of data to search the transactions to find the email address. (Step #5). As you don’t have the person’s Paypal address, usually that is the transaction ID number.

How to find a buyers email address on paypal

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Now you paste that data into the Paypal ‘All Transactions’ search bar and hit ‘enter’ (steps 6 and 7), and Paypal shows you the entry for the transaction, but not yet the email address. For that you have to actually click on the transaction (step 8) so that you can be taken to the full transaction and, at last, see the email address of the person who sent you the money, or the invoice, or whatever.

Eight steps just to get a darned email address that Paypal already has and which they could have just included in the email that started this whole thing. In fact, they do so for most other payments, so why not for payments made with paypal.me (to pick but one situation in which this occurs).

Here’s the easier, more direct way.

How to Find the Email Address of a Buyer on Paypal

This method will take you directly to the transaction page for the individual transaction, which includes the email address of the payor.

First, you do need to be logged into Paypal, so if you aren’t already, log in to Paypal.

Now copy the transaction ID from the email that you received from Paypal, and paste it in at the end of this link:

https://www.paypal.com/activity/payment/

So, for example, if your transaction ID is 80F185L446573B

you would create this link:

https://www.paypal.com/activity/payment/80F185L446573B

Paste that link into your browser and it will take you directly to the transaction page for that payment, including the email address of the person who sent you the payment!

Transaction in Paypal Account
How to Find a Buyer's Email Address on Paypal

Voila!

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8 thoughts on “How to Find the Email Address of a Buyer or Payer on Paypal

  1. It works with business accounts, but not a personal one.
    Apparently, Paypal now hides email of the sender in most cases.
    One possible way to find it out is to click “Issue refund” and before proceeding to refund, it might show you the email address.

  2. I wonder whether there might be a difference between European users and US users here. These steps don’t work for me, either, and I wonder if it has to do with GDPR or something. Either that or it’s a difference between a “Friends and Family” payment or a commercial payment.

  3. I also have found that this doesn’t work anymore, is it browser dependant? I’m using Chrome.

  4. This does not work, it just brings up the transaction details same as if you have clicked on it for your paypal activity page.

    1. Wyatt, this absolutely works we just now tested it again. But you have to be already logged in to your Paypal account and you have to follow these steps exactly:

      Paste the following link, including the transaction id, into your browser bar *after* logging in to Paypal:

      https://www.paypal.com/activity/payment/$transaction#

      where the transaction number is the number from the email.

  5. Hi there,
    Thank you for taking the time to assemble this tutorial. Unfortunately, these instructions might need to be updated as for the life of me, I’m completely unable to find or confirm the email address of a contact I sent money to (my brother). I see the contact name, but impossible to find the email address of that contact (or any contact for that matter). Quite the bummer…. hard to believe PayPal would have overlooked such a fundamental feature. If I’m missing something, please let me know!
    Thank you,
    Mathias

    1. Hello, Mathias. This still works for us (effective 30 Dec 22), however this is for payments you have received, not payments you have sent. Presumably you already have the email address of someone to whom you have sent a Paypal payment, otherwise how would you pay them, unless you are using the Paypal.me feature. Still, if you click on the transaction link in a payment you have sent, the individual transaction record will contain the email address under “Contact info”. We have just confirmed this with three different Paypal transactions that we have sent and in all of them the associated email address was listed under “Contact info”.

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