Alternatives to Paypal

Hi there,

Did you @TindieTeam already think about alternatives for PayPal?

As this website sells everything in USD, things are very expensive for non-USD customers.
For example, when someone from the UK buys something, they pay a 2.5% to 4% conversion(GBP->USD) fee, then the 5% tindie fee(which includes paypal payment fee) and then on the other side another 2.5% to 4% from USD->EUR.

This is unnecessary and really, really expensive in the end. Why not ask which currency sellers want to be paid in? This saves one conversion step which is a 2.5% to 4% saving.

Currently I’m charged 2.66% to convert from USD to EUR, so that’s a roughly 10% fee I have to charge my customers extra.

Hello,

Thanks for your post!

We appreciate the feedback. There are no current plans to offer alternatives to PayPal or choices in payout currency but I’ll absolutely make note of your suggestions and share your psot with my team for further discussion.

Thanks,
Tindie Team

You can avoid Paypal’s ridiculous exchange rates on the disbursement side by setting up a borderless USD account with Transferwise and linking that to your paypal account (you need to phone them to do this, since the account has US banking details - whatever paypal support might say, they do allow this - I’ve done it twice - just ask to speak to someone else if they try to fob you off!).

Then there is no conversion fee to get the USD funds from Paypal to Transferwise and conversion from USD to EUR/GBP or whatever is at standard bank rate not “paypal rate”. Transferwise do change a fee for the conversion but just do the maths to see how much you save on the whole transaction once the rate is taken into account. I’ve literally saved thousands of GBP by doing this…

It can’t help customers getting ripped off by paypal on the purchase, but at least stops the seller lining paypal’s fat pockets at disbursement time too

What about Paypal’s recent change regarding refunds?

Mr. Rossmann (the macbook repair prodigy) has made a video about it. Apparently they now not only keep the baseline fee (30 cents?), but also the percentage of the total sum.

Wow, haven’t seen that one. This is starting to getting ridiculous really. Due to the nature of this website, you’d expect that most of the money ends up with the maker. However, with fees and conditions getting worse, it starts to get expensive to list products. The same happens with eBay, listing something starts to get ridiculously expensive and the customer is paying for it.

I am happy to put my money in escrow at tindie for 30 days(so it is easier to refund a customer so they can keep their guarantee) if it saves me some of the costs and saves me trouble, there are enough alternatives to PayPal these days.

Luckily my website sales are going up and I can give customers a generous discount for not using paypal and I am sure others do the same so there might come a point people stop listing at this site… Which would be a shame as the support on here is excellent.

Yes… paypal has become arrogant.

I’ve been selling Plasma Cutters & Welders based on Inverter Technology since 2004 and have used PayPal as my payment gateway. This new policy is ridiculous and bad business for PayPal too. Who ever is in charge doesn’t realize there is no way for them to accurately determine the loss of transactions that will occur due to this stupid policy. paypal obviously doesn’t that sellers are their customers… not the buyers.

They have no respect for the a purchase agreement between the seller and buyer, which is a necessity for seller protection.

It’s as if they think they need to “protect” the buyer from the seller and have figured out a way to profit from it while punishing the seller for suffering a return.

This policy is so stupid and dumb that it’s even hard to derive logical explanation.

Obviously there are fools at the helm.

paypal use to be a model of efficiency. Then a number of years ago they started changing the website and caused many operational problems that never got fixed. Just DUMB!

FYI: I’ve been looking at square.com as a paypal alternative. So far it look good.

Square has about the same transaction percentage and does not charge for their Virtual Terminal ($30 savings for me each month) and nice website and a free store.

Also… ebay is adopting their own stupid anti business policies. Example If I sell a $1300 machine, ship it for $75, and the customer “claims” not as described ebay will FORCE the seller (me) to pay the return shipping (it happened). In my case as much as $80. That policy has caused me to reduce my sales by qualifying my customers to (only) reduce risk.

Note… in the above real-world situation that would be $80 + the paypal transaction fee of around $42 (they will now keep) . So my loss generated by the policies of ebay and paypal would be $122 and I get an effectively “used” machine in return.

These people in charge of paypal and ebay are obviously unqualified… idiots!

Sadly I fear it’s a sign to the times… neurotic times.

Imagine people of this caliber in charge of medical, law, oh yes and government.

Enough said, I’ve got to stop thinking about this.

@hotchk155
Did you do a withdrawal recently?

Paypal just informed me they can’t allow Transferwise as it is a UK based institution.

Yes I use it on a regular basis. When the first person at Paypal says they can’t add a TW account, ask to be put back in the queue to speak to someone else. Second time lucky for me.

If I could not withdraw through Transferwise I would be unable to continue to sell through Tindie since there is no way I am prepared to accept Paypal’s conversion rates again and AFAIK Tindie provide no other options.

BTW - Transferwise is actually Estonia-based

Edit:removed duplicate post!

It seems that the bank statement I had to send to PayPal shows the Transferwise UK address and therefore PayPal thinks it is a UK institution and not US.

So now I guess I have to find another way to convince them to add my US bank details…

[edit]
So now they suddenly claim they can only add “physical” banks to paypal. What the…

Praise yourself lucky.

Paypal keeps repeating the same message every time. When I ask for a clarification, they ignore me. Happened for the third time now.

I read more reports online that they are actively protecting their own conversion rate and there is no way for me to add the US account. It’s paypal policy to ban Transferwise and others.

This is sad really. I now have to increase prices on Tindie by 10% as they only accept paypal and have no plans to change this. The customer is paying for it. Especially now that I got another policy change from paypal that they increased their fees again. I feel robbed.

@TindieTeam please consider alternatives to paypal. This really hurts. There are more than enough alternatives available.

It would be great to have payoneer.com as an alternative. They offer easy and simple transfers from their accounts anywhere else via swift.

Any updates on the topic? Our team is unlucky enough to be from a country not supported by paypal

I think it would be neat to have payoneer as an alternative

With Payoneer there would be a minimum disbursement amount and/or a fee for each transfer.

At the moment Tindie does not pass on the fee to sellers when a refund is issued. However, as the number of cancelled orders have gone up due to COVID shipping issues, it’s something we may have to start doing. So please ensure your stock is up to date and you remove shipping rates from countries you can’t ship to.

We would be more than happy to pay additional fees for ability to, well, receive something People from USA, Canada and most of EU don’t imagine what it is like to work with Paypal in the rest of the world (for example support ticket for blocked account just now took 3 weeks to receive an automated answer from paypal, no one looked into the problem, and we are facing risk of completely loosing money for a bunch of orders our customers already received - if human support won’t eventually look into this, it will be the case)

Please let me know your preferred provider on this discussion (click on the link to reply in that thread):

Paypal has removed the option to disable currency conversion by default. But it is still possible. Paypal exchange rate is the default option, but if you click the blue “More exchange rate options.” you see this screen, which again defaults to PayPal’s exchange rate which has a markup of 3.5% but buyer can choose to have conversion done by credit card.

But it would be much easier if sellers can choose their preferred currency so to avoid any conversion fees. Or at least have an EUR option.

Maybe also 2co (2 checkout) could be an option for payout?

What is current status of adding alternative methods? Paypal has just blocked the only middleman service we could use in our country - so no idea how we’ll get money for orders we already sent, and can’t continue selling unless some alternative is available

Hi - has there been any update on this? it seems like a whole load of posts from january have vanished from this thread including what I had written. I asked if it would be possible to use transferwise? i have suspended my tindie store until i can use something other than paypal - at present (including a 3% USD-USD transfer flat fee for UK paypal accounts) they would take more than tindie do for my sales.