I occasionally sell items on Ebay and give customers the option of USPS or UPS.

Someone just purchased an item and chose UPS but when I went to purchase the shipping in Paypal I got an error message that the account information for UPS did not match the UPS information for me on file at PayPal

It has been a while since someone selected UPS but I have dropped a number of packages off at the local UPS office so I know it used to work.

I called UPS, and they said that it was because I didn’t have a UPS account so create one.

I created one, but that didn’t enable me to print the label. I still got the same error.

UPS told me to call PayPal tech support at 1-888-221-1161. I called that number and got a different story.

PayPal said that the account created at UPS wouldn’t work and that I needed to create a new one in PayPal.

Steps:

1. Log into PayPal. Make sure that your account information wherever listed has a correct phone number. I found this to be crucial as I did the steps below without a phone number listed one place and I still got an error. After I added the phone number the process worked.
2. Scroll down and click on the words Selling Tools.
3. Scroll down on that page and click on Set my shipping Preferences.
4. Scroll down on the PayPal Information Page to the UPS Account Information. If there is an account there, remove it because UPS accounts in PayPal that have been inactive (as little as a couple of months according to my technical support guy) are invalidated
5. Then, create a new account, following the prompts. (I had to log out of PayPal and log back in to get the old account info to disappear before I could create the new account.
6. I went back at this point and I could print my label.

The caveat is to make sure you have an active UPS account in PayPal before you list or you may run into this snag. Another warning is that PayPal says that it may take UPS 4-6 days to notify Paypal that you qualify for the special Ebay shipping rates with UPS.

Another lesson here that it serves no purpose to create a UPS account in UPS.com for Ebay because it will not work there.