Imagine that you stumble upon a store or a private seller, which is so rooted in the United States, and also paranoid, that its billing system flatly refuses to accept your Orthodox visas and master cards issued by domestic banks.

It would seem that there is nothing left to buy a credit card with US billing from the relevant comrades dejectedly to close the store page, having gone in search of a friendlier seller, how do you notice the familiar PayPal label that the site owner hung, inviting everyone to buy his product, paying the most convenient way for you. And here it is, a victory, you are busily strolling through the pages of the checkout process, when you suddenly realize that the seller of the small thing that does not accept Orthodox cards for payment, also so insolent that he sends his goods only within his homeland, scoring on the whole world and international shipping problems.

If getting an address for receiving parcels in the US is no longer a problem, here's how to get an American address available to choose from when paying PayPal? Yes, PayPal does not allow staff members who have registered in a country other than the United States to add a United States shipping address.
')
But for every tricky ass, as you know ...
The method of adding a US shipping address (as well as any other address other than the country of account registration) has been known for a long time, and, in principle, is not a secret. In the specialized forums, a guide on how to add a US shipping address is distributed without any restrictions, so I decided to make this information available to all sufferers.

Not very sophisticated users may ask, “what's stopping us from adding a US address to your PayPal address book right from your account?”. And we will be prevented by the PayPal security policy, which limits the freedom of action when adding addresses to the fact that the country at the address cannot be changed. If you have registered an account with a primary address, for example, the Russian Federation, you will not be able to change the country in the “Country” field of the newly added addresses, and for all the addresses there will be “Russia” assigned to “Russia”. But for that, I’ve gathered everyone here to show how easy, simple and safe it is to bypass PayPal policies, as a result, having acquired a US address in the list of available address pool.

I will deliberately apply to the screenshots with the filter "captain obvious", not bullying users for Habr for the sake of, but for inexperienced users who got on Habr from the search.

Step 1. Adding a US Address to the PayPal Address List

What do you think, what close PayPal alliance will we use to add a US address to PayPal's address book? That's right, of course, the big brother of the stick will help us with this, the largest auction site - eBay.com. To be frank, we will be satisfied with any site that allows you to enter an arbitrary delivery address and spend after paying with paypal, but in order not to clutter your head with the problems of finding such sites, we will simply use the good old eBay.

All we need in the first step is to add a US address to your eBay address book and buy anything using your newly added US address. We are lucky, because eBay has no prejudice on this, and your shipping address may be at least in Uganda. Therefore, after logging in to ebay.com, you simply need to follow the link leading to the address management page and add a new address:
The screenshot above and hereafter will feature the mail-forwarder address of shopfans , which I use when delivering goods from the United States. But simply adding a US address to the list of available ebay addresses will not give us anything, in the next step we need to make a purchase of something, choosing the newly added address in the US as the delivery.

There is no point in describing the buying process on ebay, all of you have already bought something there.

Just choose some small things, for example, this cute droid on the left, which I bought solely for the purpose of adding the next American address to the address pool of PayPal.

Immediately after the payment for the goods sent to the desired address in the states, we can proceed to step # 2.

It is worth noting, however, that the US address entered by us will still not be visible in the address list of your PayPal account, but they will be visible in the process of payment by PayPal.

Let's imagine that you all got something on eBay, using an address in the United States, and are ready to begin an easy flirt with PayPal's targeted policies.

Step 2. Activation of the US shipping address

Okay, go to the interesting part. If the addresses of countries other than the country of registration do not appear in your PayPal account, then somewhere they should be? Yes, you can see them if you go to the order payment form using PayPal:

By default, PayPal uses your primary shipping address on the order verification page. As you can see, the St. Petersburg address is displayed there, which we will now change to an implicitly added American one.
It is already becoming clear that any delivery address that you used when paying for paypal will be available in its address pool, just select it "in the forehead" will not work. Let's see what we will see if we try to change the delivery address by clicking on the “Change” link:

After you have made a purchase on Amer. address via ebay, the standard form of choosing the address you take the above form. As you can see, immediately under the usual addresses of your country, a block of addresses appeared, which PayPal has kindly designated as inaccessible to choice (our system). This is where our foreign address looms, but (luck) the control for its selection is not active ...

And here lies the simple and childlike workaround of our problem! Why paypal shows us addresses that are inaccessible for selection - I don’t understand, but it’s their choice, we can only use this small loophole.

Surely, the geek of an average hand has already figured out how to turn an inactive radiobutton into an active one, but I repeat, we will chew it up (be careful, KO will broadcast) for the smallest, tea is not proud.

So, what we need is any Webkit (Safari, Chrome) or FireFox browser with the FireBug plugin. Armed with one of the tools, we start easy preparation of the form for address selection.
Further, all the screenshots show the steps performed in the Chrome browser (in Safari and FireFox + FireBug, everything will be very similar).

Let's make the choice of the third address active, for this we simply click the right mouse button on the line with the inactive address and proceed to viewing the item code:

Well, then everything becomes obvious. We get to the html code of the div element, in which all that is required of us is to erase the disabled attribute:


Everything, bingo, attribute deletion makes an active element with a cherished US address, and we, they say, free to go.
The window with the developer mode can be closed and enjoy the active radiobutton:


Actually, the main part of Marlezonsky ballet is over, so we simply got access to the choice of delivery address with a country different from that used when registering a PayPal account, which was the purpose of this instruction.

As an afterword

Okay, we added an amer address to the stick, but what benefits can you get from this?

First of all , you can stumble upon eBay on capricious merchants who write something like this right so brazenly - “ship only to confirmed USA PayPal address”. This phrase in the listing of the lot can mean nothing, and lead to problems with sending the lot, which we do not need.

Okay, we'll show him the US address in PayPal, but what to do with his confirmation? You will be surprised, but PayPal is so strange that when you make several successful shipments to your American paypal address, you can assign it the status of confirmed:



The problem is only one, having received confirmed status with one purchase, you can get unconfirmed with the next. It looks like the phase of the moon somehow affects the assignment of verified status, so there is an additional. Life hacking, which often works.

If the seller stubbornly wants to get a confirmed address, and the phase of the moon when buying was clearly not in your favor, and you received unconfirmed status, then make it simple. Show the seller a saved screenshot with a successful confirmed status, or even send him a statement from paypal, which is confirmed. It works in 90% of cases.

So the presence of amer address in the address pool paypal gives you direct access to the lots that were previously closed to you.



Secondly , as I wrote in the introduction to the topic, in some stores you may encounter the fact that cards issued by banks of non-democratic America will not be accepted by the transaction center, then paypal with the US address may turn out to be your lifeline. But I must warn you that not always the choice of an American address in the address list guarantees successful payment, often the store is satisfied with the additional check on the “country of registration” of the account, and there is nothing to be done (at least legal).

In general, if now the American address seems to be unusable to you, then add it anyway, when you need it, it is always better to have a joker up your sleeve.

Ps. As for the safety of using this method: for the second year already, I have not heard a single case of claims from PayPal, but, nevertheless, this is a bypass of the standard procedure, so use it at your own peril and risk.