Gift cards in general and PayPal are sometimes a real challenge.
Even PayPal's own own Help FAQs, they state the following: You can't link a gift card, prepaid card, or one-time-use card to your PayPal account. From our experience the exceptions are, PayPal Products or Green Dot Money Packs or a Prepaid Card that allows you to register both your name and billing address.
You have a few options to try:
First thing is, your customer has to register both his name and address with the card issuer, if there's no name and address associated with the card, PayPal's system won't validate the card.
As for how you can accept the funds from two cards:
* One option would be to send the customer an invoice. The downside is you would have to send two invoices as PayPal does not permit one to split payments. Meaning if you sent one invoice, the customer could not use both cards to pay one invoice.
* Another option would be if you used PayPal Here, it is possible to accept the payment without the customer being present, i.e., over the phone. Again, this would require two transactions. Using this method, manual input, you are subject to a higher transaction processing fee verses simply swiping the card.
* Option 3 would be to use Virtual Terminal or VT. The drawback is this product has a monthly fee of $30 plus the transaction processing fees. VT is designed to process in person or phone, mail and fax transactions however, again, it would require two transactions.
* If the customer has a PayPal Account, he could use the Send Money feature and send you two payments.
Bottom line, regardless of which method you choose, it's a challenge. Your easiest solution would be for the customer to use a credit card and you send him an invoice. The customer pays you and he can save his prepaid cards for a purchase elsewhere.
One last reason for the above suggestion. If someone pays you for an item via two transactions, you are not covered for Seller Protection according to the User Agreement. If this payment is for a service or something intangible, it's a moot point anyway as there's no Seller Protection for services or intangible items anyway.
