Jump To PayPal Transaction

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.