PayPal is one of the world’s most popular platforms for sending and receiving money. It is popular because it offers users protection when purchasing from online merchants, where if anything goes wrong during the transaction, like if the goods or services aren’t delivered as promised, customers can dispute the purchase and get their money back.
This is a lot easier than having to call your bank and get the charges reversed. This is why PayPal remains one of the largest and most popular platforms today.
That being said, if you’re trying to manage your PayPal account and want to delete your transaction history, we’ve got some good and bad news for you.
The bad news is that you can’t delete transaction history. In the past, you could archive them, but now you can’t and they’re more visible. In a way it’s a good thing because it keeps things transparent, but in case there are some purchases you’d rather not show up, the bad news is that you can’t just delete them individually.
The good news is that you can actually delete your transaction history, but this will come at the cost of deleting your entire PayPal account. If you don’t have that many transactions made or if it’s not linked to your business, then maybe this could be something to consider.
Downloading Your PayPal Data
Before you completely close your account, you might want to consider downloading your PayPal data first. This basically creates an offline history of all your PayPal transactions made over the years so you can refer to it when you need to, whether it be for your own personal records or even tax purposes.
If you don’t need or want to download your PayPal activity or account data, then just skip to the next section on how to delete your PayPal account.
- Log into your PayPal account
- Click the cogwheel icon
- Click on Data & Privacy
- Under Manage your data, click on Download your data
- Select all the information you want and click Submit Request and wait for the information to be sent to your email
Alternatively, if you don’t need to download your entire PayPal account data and just want activity data:
- Click Activity
- Click Statements
- Click Custom
- Select the date range of the activity information you want to download
- Select the format
- Click Create Report
- You’ll receive an email once the report is ready
Deleting Your PayPal Account
- Log into your PayPal account
- Click the cogwheel icon
- Under Account options, click Close your account
- Click Close Account to confirm
Keep in mind that even if you were to sign up for a new PayPal account using the same email address, everything will be gone and your account will essentially be treated as brand new, but if that’s what you want and you want all your PayPal transaction data deleted, then this is what you’ll have to do.
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