Jump To PayPal Transaction

April 16th, 2010

I complained on Twitter about PayPal’s unfortunate transaction search utility, which doesn’t recognize the transaction ID itself as a search term.

Georg C. Brückmann chimed in with a semi-solution, which is a URL template you can use to jump directly to a PayPal transaction by ID. Take the root PayPal URL for your country, and add “vst/id=” followed by the PayPal transaction ID. In the United States, this leads to a URL like: https://www.paypal.com/vst/id=1234.

It’s sad to say that remembering a static PayPal URL and pasting in the transaction ID in the magic location is indeed easier than navigating PayPal’s slow and awkward transaction history UI. But it could be even easier with a little automation.

Jump To PayPal Transaction ID is a simple AppleScript that prompts you for a transaction ID, constructs the desired URL, and opens it in your default browser. If you don’t live in the United States, open the script in AppleScript Editor and alter the template URL contained within it.

I put this in my Safari-specific scripts folder:

[Home] | Library | Scripts | Applications | Safari

So it’s available from FastScripts whenever I’m in Safari. Problem solved.

This entry was posted to AppleScript, Business, FastScripts, Web. Comments are closed. Thanks for reading!

3 Responses to “Jump To PayPal Transaction”

  1. Brian Webster Says:
    April 16th, 2010 at 1:19 pm

    Nice! I adapted this to an OmniWeb shortcut – for those OmniWeb users, just add a shortcut with the URL https://www.paypal.com/vst/id=%@ Then, say you give the shortcut the name “ppt@”, you can just type “ppt 12487654ABCDE” into the address bar, and the transaction pops right up.

  2. Gus Mueller Says:
    April 17th, 2010 at 4:07 pm

    Oh this is awesome. I just added this to my order database, and it’s so much faster to search for things on my end, then on paypal’s – and I can go straight to the transaction. woot.

  3. Nirav Mehta Says:
    August 17th, 2011 at 12:47 pm

    Hi Daniel,

    I was reviewing MarsEdit and saw a reference to this post in the screenshot, so thought you would like our software!

    Putler is a PayPal client app that lets you quickly (and I mean blazing fast) search for any PayPal transaction. Not just that you get all its info, can provide refund on it and also see insightful reports about sales, products and customers.

    I think you will like it.

    If you do, and would like a review copy, let me know!

    :Nirav

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