Cross-border founder (Canada) owning AU Pty Ltd – best practice for PayPal AU?

Payments + Shipping & Fulfilment
1

Hi everyone,

Looking for input from founders operating cross-border structures.

I’m a Canadian resident and recently acquired established Australian Shopify stores owned by an AU Pty Ltd. The company has:

  • Australian ANZ business bank account

  • Active Shopify Payments (working fine)

  • Historic use of PayPal (which I’d prefer to maintain if viable)

The friction point is PayPal AU verification.

PayPal requires the primary account holder / verifier to be an Australian resident associated with the company (SMS + ID verification). As a non-resident, I can’t complete this myself.

Our nominee resident director (via a legal services firm) is understandably reluctant to act as the PayPal account holder or provide personal contact details for verification.

So I’m weighing:

  • Having the resident director act as authorised PayPal representative

  • Appointing a local AU operations contact

  • Structuring intercompany use of a Canadian PayPal (not ideal from compliance perspective)

  • Removing PayPal entirely and relying on Shopify Payments / Stripe

For those running AU entities as non-resident founders:

  • How did you handle PayPal AU?

  • Did your resident director take on that role?

  • Did you formalise it contractually?

  • Or did you simply eliminate PayPal?

My priority is compliance and avoiding frozen funds, while maintaining conversion continuity on a store that historically used PayPal.

Appreciate insight from anyone who’s navigated this structure.

2

Stripe is easy peasy. There are more common payment methods in AU that you should support, PayTo, BECS, Afterpay, Klarna and Zip.

5

Thanks for the perspective.

I reviewed the numbers across both stores:

12 months: PayPal is 0–5% of GMV.
Recent 90 days: one store briefly ~18%, otherwise minimal.

So it’s not structurally core, but not entirely irrelevant either.

My hesitation is less about revenue and more about compliance fragility — PayPal AU requires an AU resident verifier tied to the company, which creates structural exposure in a cross-border setup.

For those who removed PayPal in AU, did you see any measurable drop in conversion, or was the impact marginal once Shop Pay / BNPL were active?

Trying to balance simplicity vs optionality.

7

Hi @finny — appreciate the structural framing.

I ran the numbers across both AU stores before making any decision.

Over the last 12 months:

• PayPal accounts for a small minority of total GMV
• AOV via PayPal is normal (A$268 and A$400 respectively)
• 83–88% of PayPal orders are first-time buyers
• Overall store conversion has remained stable (0.88% → 0.86% on one store, 0.50% → 0.47% on the other)

So while PayPal is skewed toward new customers, it does not appear to materially move overall conversion at the store level.

Given the AU KYC structure and compliance exposure risk, the downside of introducing a fragile node may outweigh the marginal acquisition lift.

Still evaluating, but the data suggests PayPal is a comfort option rather than a structural revenue driver in this setup.

Would be curious if you’ve seen materially different outcomes in similar AU cross-border structures.