This is some new height in user hostile design. In Paypal checkout forms, you can no longer checkout without logging in if your email OR your credit card is associated with a Paypal account.

Problem: My paypal account is Canadian, and uses a Canadian credit card that no longer exists. American credit cards cannot be added to a Canadian account.

For posterity, and anyone who wants to figure out how to change the country your Paypal account is associated with. Short answer is, you cannot. You have to close your account and reopen it. I found out in a very unpleasant way today.

Here’s what I wrote to them in their “feedback form”:

Do your customers never move from one country to another? Or do customers not ever have credit cards from two different countries? I just want to be a Canadian who pays with an American credit card!

For that matter. Why can’t I checkout without logging in? You require email on your checkout form, and then when I provide the email, you don’t let me checkout because I have an account. My account is in Canada, and linked to a Canadian credit card that no longer exists, to which I cannot add an American credit card.

So now I’m closing this account in order to reopen it, and I am losing $10 in the process.

Your checkout form is user hostile.

When you’re a payment gateway, giving users no way around you is one way to increase your conversion rate. It is also a way of making your users very angry. I am now motivated to actively root for Stripe, Square, and the like.

On second thought, I am not going to reopen my Paypal account.

At least they donate the $10 I’m abandoning in my account to an unspecified charity. Ugh.

Update: I’ve closed my account, and I even tried reopening an account in the US. Still can’t checkout. First it said that my email is still associated with an existing account. Now it says my credit card is linked to another account. Paypal is a nightmare. I just want to buy some pillow cases!