>In this case, this person obviously doesn't get it. "Why? These are my customers!" <- Right, which is why they are not "donating".
You seem to be confusing different things. After being unable to use donations, they tried to use sales. And paypal said no. That's the context of what you're quoting, after donations had been given up on.
This all seems to have happened during the course of the same conversation, and reading more of their blog history I don't see them saying that they then actually used a Buy Now button for any period of time.
Regardless, once the conversation started going farther in that direction, the issue did change (and I did not touch on that part of the problem); specifically, it became entirely surrounding "purchasing products sent to a different shipping address than the one the buyer specified during checkout", which is apparently against PayPal's terms of service.
(Note: I have not personally verified that it is against PayPal's terms of service, but I have no reason not to believe the employee of Etsy, a company that relies quite strongly on PayPal and certainly has gone down this road numerous times with them while determining what features they can offer to customers, who posted elsewhere in this thread [1].)
Because I think the sarik is talking about the whole idea itself, which according to what I understand from this complaint is
- 'Donate' money for the 'Give kids a random present'
- Blog author invests time to handle the flow of money, orders toys and selects/distributes to kids
What saurik is saying is that the first step, 'Donate amount of $currency to send a random toy of roughly the same value to a 3rd party' is pretty much a sale. The author itself is comparing his idea at one point with Amazon, purchasing gifts for someone else.
I'm sympathetic here and don't like the outcome, but I think your comment is incorrect: Saurik didn't confuse different things here. We might argue about whether these 'donations' should be considered sales, but - you misunderstood the argument, I think.
You seem to be confusing different things. After being unable to use donations, they tried to use sales. And paypal said no. That's the context of what you're quoting, after donations had been given up on.