Potential PayPal Surcharge

Post by **porcupine** » Tue May 06, 2003 12:31 am

Hi there everyone,

Much to my disappointment, I'd just gone to our PayPal account to withdraw to our bank account, and found that PayPal's USD:CDN exchange rate was at a mere 1.38:1.00 (about 7% below the current rate). When this is combined with the fact that PayPal skims up to what? 5% off sales, it's becoming less and less affordable to accept PayPal as a payment method.

Also notable, PayPal does not permit Canadian clients to add US dollar bank accounts in Canadian banks (thus we cannot transfer it to our USD account and get a reasonable rate), nor do they allow Canadians to add US shipping addresses, making it difficult for much use to be made of the PayPal account aside from paying CPanel bills to DarkORB.

As a result (this is by no means implamented, nor final), we may be tacking on a 10% "inconvinience" fee for anyone paying by PayPal. If you do the math, this isn't to fetch extra profit, but merely to recoup losses that are being generated by accepting this form of Payment.

If you've got feedback, please feel free to leave it. I'm well aware that PayPal is the only billing option for a lot of people, which is why we haven't implamented this before, but we have to draw the line somewhere on this subject.

Alexander · Post by **Alexander** » Wed May 07, 2003 7:46 am

Next to that, PayPal can freeze any account for any reason they like (it's in their TOS), so I would advise people that can only pay using paypal to get another payment method in case that happens .. .Since YES it does happen and if it does it takes forever to re-open it... I personally haven't had that experience, but I've read quite a few articles on people who have had that experience....

Some background: http://www.paypalsucks.com/

I also accept the fact that many people (myself included) use paypal without any/much problems, but I think you shoul dhave least seen that website once. . .since it shows the other side of the story ...

Post by **porcupine** » Wed May 07, 2003 10:24 am

I wonder, if they freeze your account, does your PayPal debit card still work? I had considered using our merchant account to bill our own debit card awhile back to avoid bad PayPal exchange rates...

Alexander · Post by **Alexander** » Wed May 07, 2003 11:08 am

That might be a nice workaround, but I doubt they let you use the funds in the account any way possible if they freeze it....