Well, the fees are involved with accepting payments. You can't accept credit card payments (or eBay payments) with a personal account. Although the personal account has NO FEES, you can only pretty much send money and accept Paypal Credit. The other account types (i.e. business, premier) have very similar rates.. It basically comes down to how much you make a month...
Well, I have the debit card and it works great for me. You get charged a $1 fee whenever you withdraw money at an ATM machine. However, when I use the debit card to make purchase, I get a small percentage of the purchase back from paypal. I guess that's one of their perks to show off your debit cards more often to merchants and get some form of advertisement.
You can set up 2 Paypal Accounts legally, One business and one personal account. For some paypal to paypal transfer of small volume, you can have them send the money to your personal account so you will not be charged anything. If they need to pay via credit card then use the business account.
I use the paypal debit card too. Have had no problems with it, or paypal, for a long time. And I especially like the 1.5% return too.
Although I've had no experience with it (although I think I'm going to apply for it for the hell of it when I get to UK), I've read some negative stuff about it: consumeraffairs.com/online/paypal_debit.html Bah, I STILL can't post live links.
I think you guys should consider this first, before you complain: Not all the money you pay to Paypal actually goes to Paypal. Every time somebody pays you using a credit card, Paypal have to pay a percentage of the amount as fees to the credit card provider (Amex, Diners, VISA, Mastercard etc.). I don't know what the rates are in US, but in New Zealand they are 2.5% for Visa & Mastercard and Amex and Diners and even higher. If you consider this, then you will see that Paypal fees are not bad at all. Regards, dfsweb
Yup, if you do some research into other merchant accounts and you deal with relatively small amounts, its hard to find a better deal than Paypal. Unfortunately I havent had the smoothest experience over the past but I still use them because there is no reasonable alternative.
I haven't read all the responses. I do not like the fees at all. When you get paid $400-500 they took a good chunk. However, their chunk will help you at tax time so print out all your paypal records.
Paypal probably has to pay in the neighborhood of 1.55% + $.10 / transaction. As far as I know, they are signed up directly with Visa/MC, so they get pretty much interchange pricing. As far as normal businesses, 2.1 - 2.5% is common for online businesses. That's still a pretty decent margin. However, paypal isn't charged anything for P2P money transfers, but they do charge business accounts the same regardless of the type of transaction. Because of this, paypal is making a huge amount on p2p transfers on business accounts.
Paypal is still paying plenty per transaction. Maybe not as much as mom and pop corner store but the CC companies are getting their issue.
I think several of us are missing the point here. No doubt, paypal has to pay fees themselves, but they obviously have excellent rates - afterall, if they can provide a decent rate (one of the lowest in the market) to us consumers, and still make a profit, they obviously have good rates themselves. In addition they are quite a brand, people trust them.
I don't think competition will make it cheaper. At the very best, it could help to keep them from going up. The problem lies in the credit card interchange cost. Visa and Mastercard don't lower it. Not for anyone. Not for Walmart, not for Google, and not for Paypal. There is really no way that Paypal could lower the rate by any significance without Visa and Mastercard lowering interchange, which isn't going to happen. On the subject of Walmart and interchange. If Walmart keeps suing, the rates are only going to keep going up as well. The backlash from walmart winning the lawsuit three years ago, was Visa and Mastercard raising interchange 4 times in one year. Walmart got their way, and the rest of the world got stuck with the bill. On Visa alone, they estimate 3 Trillion dollars processed per year. That lawsuit cost the world 3 billion dollars in just one year. http://www.bizjournals.com/extraedge/consultants/small_business_briefing/2002/09/09/column102.html
They don't make exceptions. There are different levels of interchange, based on the type of processing being done (swiped, ecommerce, etc.), and interchange is different in some countries (The US has the highest interchange rate). But, they don't lower it based on the size of a business. If we're talking about a merchant service provider or ISO, they absolutely can lower it for large businesses. Onbiously they cant go lower than what their hard cost is, but they can lower it. Also, its pretty much impossible for a business to go straight to Visa or MC for processing. If you want to learn about interchange levels read this really long article: http://www.greensheet.com/interchangeuntangled.html Paypal charges a very reasonable processing fee compared to their competitors. Take 2checkout or other for example. Paypal you pay ~ 2.3%, 2checkout you pay ~ 6%. That's a big difference.