What are mass payments? A guide for small businesses

That’s why many organizations use mass payment solutions, which can help streamline payment processing by allowing companies to pay multiple people at once.

Read on to explore how to use mass payouts or mass payments for your business. Learn about rebates, commissions, and paying in different currencies.

What are mass payments and how do they work?

Mass payments allow businesses to easily send money to multiple people at the same time, saving time and effort.

Also known as mass payouts, this solution is often used by organizations that work with numerous freelancers, vendors, suppliers, and partners around the world. Mass payments allow companies to pay people in different currencies, anywhere PayPal balance accounts are available.

Click here to create or log into your PayPal business account.

What are the benefits of mass payouts?

PayPal’s mass pay option enables account holders to send money, and the recipients will receive the funds in their PayPal account. You can send up to 15,000 payments at once with the API or 10,000 with batch upload and a single click.

There are numerous benefits to mass payment solutions like Payouts, such as:

• Reduced friction for vendors and suppliers: You can pay vendors and suppliers with just an email or phone number. They can access their funds quickly so they can spend or withdraw them.¹
• Simplify international payments: Send disbursements globally to recipients around the world.
• Automatic currency conversion: Payments can be sent in USD, CAD, AUD, EUR, MXN, and GBP, even if you don’t maintain a balance in that currency.²
• Cost effective: The sender pays a fee when sending money. It’s free for recipients to receive their funds.³
• Organized: When your payments are sent, you’ll receive a notification. You can also track the status of each payment in PayPal, and your payout history is available online.

When to use mass payments?

Mass payment solutions can work for all types of industries and situations, including:

• Retail or e-commerce: A marketplace may need to make hundreds of seller payouts.
• Financial services: A bank that needs to disburse payments on behalf of their clients.
• The gig economy: Businesses may need to pay hundreds of contingent workers, sometimes in multiple currencies.
• Service providers: companies paying bonuses or commissions for referrals.
• Media: Newspapers incentivizing mobile readership.
• Reseller: A retailer may need to pay a food manufacturer for product.
• Non-profits: A non-profit that must pay relief aid to service providers during a natural disaster.

What is batch processing?

Instead of sending transactions one by one, batch processing is a method used in mass payments that processes all the day’s transactions at once, helping save time and increase efficiency. Learn more about how to manage mass payments.

Mass payment fees

There are fees associated with PayPal mass direct payments,⁴ including:

• For US domestic payments made through our website, the fee is only 2% per payment and capped at $1 USD.
• For payouts made through our API, it’s just $0.25 USD per U.S. transaction.
• For international mass payments, the fee is 2% of the payment amount to each recipient, up to a certain amount. Learn more about international fees.
• No fee is charged to the recipient.

To leverage PayPal’s mass payments, set up or log in to your account. Plus, learn more about fee information and Payouts terms and conditions.