My account is currently charged 3.4% + $0.30 USD for every transaction, and I'd really like to know, how do sellers of cheap items, like $1.00, $0.50 or even less, earn by selling those items and getting payment via paypal? Personal accounts have a very limited number of transactions available for non-paypal payments, and those are with even higher transaction fees, so I'm assuming those are out of the question? I'd like to offer services for cheap prices too, but I can't see how I can earn with that.
You have to be upgraded to a business account. Some services that you pay out for are not charged by Paypal.You just have to know how to game the system.
Paypal will deduct their fees from that amount and if the balance is a negative balance as in your case, you get nothing. If you are in the US, UK or Europe, you can sign up for a Micropayment account and the fees are much lower but there are conditions such as the payment must be via paypal balance and both the seller and buyer must be from the same country and using the same currency.
I'd say for items less than a dollar, you would be better off receiving the funds in your personal account to save on the fees. Even if it's somewhat limited, it's much better than the fees of the business or premiere account.
Yes but if you have both a personal and business/premier accounts you are bounded by your contractual agreement not to divert some sales to your personal account. Basically, with both types of accounts, all sales has to go through the premier/business accounts. Supposed for a moment, that what you are suggesting is not prohibited, remember that not a lot of people can pay from paypal balance. For the most of us, the only way we can have paypal balance is from selling something. However, not everyone is a seller and you have more people who merely buys on paypal and would have zero balances and each time we want to buy something, the money comes from our credit cards. So if you collect the payments through your personal account, you end up paying more in fees when they pay using their credit cards. If you deny payments from credit cards, you find yourself with a very small market. Some 190 countries are marked as Send Only countries and out of that amount, only something like 40 countries can Receive payments. Then out of that 40 countries, not everyone are selling anything.
Paypal has a micropayment service which is for small ticket items. This is about as cheap as it gets anywhere. Instead of the standard 2.9% + $.30, you pay 5% + $.05. https://www.paypal.com/IntegrationCenter/ic_micropayments.html