Some help with ebay/paypal please :)

[thomsonicus]

Hi.
I have a question concerning buying stuff internationally on ebay.
The thing is that I live in the UK and have a paypal account in the UK which operates on British pounds. I wanted to buy something from a guy in the USA (ebay) and I dont know what are the costs added by paypal when changing currencies, and how does it work. are there any additional fees, do i pay in pounds on my normal paypal account or do i have to start some paypal subaccount with american dollars?
help!

[debs3759]

On the fees page on Paypal, it says:

"Exchange rate includes a 2.5% fee"

Sellers who accept payment from international buyers pay a higher fee than from buyers in their own country. For small payments, the cost to them is an extra 0.5% of the the payment amount.

This took me longer to type than to look it up

[JAC]

Yeah, if the payment is in a currency other than the one you have in your account, paypal will take a nice conversion fee and give you a crappy rate*.

Then the bonus for paypal is they charge the seller a cross-border transaction fee to accept your payment, ontop of all the other fees.

For payapl it is a win-win-win-win situation.


* dont be surprised if paypal changes the rate while you are in the middle of a transaction!!!!!! It has happened to me a few times. It would come up with an error message, I would have to restart the payment and I noticed the exchange rate was different. ( they only change when it's in their favor!)

[thomsonicus]

thanks for the replies. found about those 2.5% just after ive started the topic; good to know about the rate changes hehe
guess i shouldnt be that bad when i'll be transferring about 15 us dollars.