Nobody Look At The Paypal Secretly Adding New Fees
Starting in June, Paypal started assessing a fee of 2.9% on on purchases marked "goods" or services" to personal accounts. They can do whatever they want, but the problem is they were very quiet about it. Almost sneakily so.
It was only announced by an email that said they had changed their Terms of Service, and then you had to go read the ToS page to find notice of the increased fee. Sneaky. When PC World blogger Jared Newman complained to them about the lacking notice, Paypal said,
"We didn't want to make a huge formal communication out of this pricing change, because we weren't really adding any fees, and we were hoping it would be a more useful experience for people," Hill said.
AKA we really hoped no one would notice. I guess the thing to do is have senders mark it "eBay purchase" or click the "personal tab" and choose one of the radio buttons there.
PayPal Adds Fees, Sneakily [PC World] (Photo: frankieleon)
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Comments:
OMG, that company is a pile of steaming crap.
Did the car dealers read their fine print?
that is what i have been doing. i tell the payment sender to mark the payment as personal, and then no fees are taken out.
I really miss pre-eBay Paypal.. was so good 10 years ago.
We could always stop using paypal and give incentives to use other services. They might actually do something other than be shiesters about everything they do. The only real recourse is to back charge them if you used a credit card through them.
The whole eBay/PayPal conglomerate is EVIL to the core. Easily the worst company in the world that hasn't necessarily actually killed anyone. If any company ever needed a governmental smack-down, it's these asshats.
Can't even begin to described how much I'd love or Google, or somebody, to come up with a viable alternative for online auctions and payments.
Some websites process their credit card payments through Paypal. I always think again about whether I want to buy from them and unless I really have a good sense of the vendor I cancel the item. I have had very few charge backs, but when I do I don't want to get involved with Paypal.
As a self-employed kind of contractor who sometimes receives credit card payments via PayPal (where there's already a 2.9% + $0.30 fee deducted from anything I receive), is there any benefit for using somewhere else different as a "micro" credit card processor (e.g. once or twice every month) credit card processor? How about Google Checkout?
...actually, the big thing there is to make sure you never let PayPal pull funds from your checking account. You must use a credit card...in this case, not so you can sic the CC company on the vendor when something goes wrong, but so you can sic them on PayPal when something goes wrong. There are times when you have little choice but to use PayPal - just never let them touch your cash.
@steveliv: If you have a problem, like the customer does a chargback, are there any rights that are given up if it marked personal?
@MalcoveMagnesia: I have a merchant account with authorize.net. The fees are pretty much the same overall. You'll get bitten no matter what choices you make.
Could not agree more. I even worked for them for some time and witnessed it all first hand. Shady shady evil people.
@Radi0logy:
Yep..my dad used it to send rent money to me in college. It was faster than checks and free at the time. PayPal sucks hard these days.
Do you give up your paypal buyer protection on ebay if you mark the payment as something other than an ebay item? I would imagine so, but perhaps someone knows for sure.
@MalcoveMagnesia: I'm a freelance graphic designer, and I've had pretty good luck with Google Checkout. They take out the same 2.9% + $.30, but I feel like I am doing business with a less evil company.
Note: for all you freelancers out there, don't use PayPal. Because you're not selling a tangible product, you aren't covered under their seller protection policy. Read more at Freelance Switch.
If you get a refund from a seller using Paypal you can look forward to only get MOST of your money back as they fee both of you.
I'm done with them and eBay.
Come on, It's Paypal.
Compared to the 50,000 other evil things they've done this year, this is utterly trivial.
Excuse me! Mr. Stalin, I believe you dropped some litter over there.....
@sybann: Untrue if the seller uses the refund link on the item's PayPal transaction page. If the seller simply tries to send money back to your e-mail address, then yes, you're charged a fee on that since it's looked at like any other transaction.
@Radi0logy: X2 for sure. Both eBay and paypal are pretty much dead to me at this point. I refuse to sell on eBay because of paypal's insanely idiotic fraud protection and of course because of eBay's silly "no negative feedback for buyers" rule.
@steveliv: how do you mark a payment as personal? We are about to launch our honeymoon wedding registry and would love to not have to pay those fees!
so, even though i spend alot of time roaming around the internet, i don't often use paypal and i am confused by this. are they now going to charge me 2.9% to buy things, or is it 2.9% for the person selling me things?
basically my question is: for my $10 woot shirt are they going to charge $10.29 now?
@MalcoveMagnesia: Google checkout has the same fee, but at least it's standard credit card fee for a credit card purchase. While paypal is charging this high credit card fee on transfers from on paypal account to another. It's highway robbery. Paypal incurs no cost when members transfer cash in their paypal accounts between each other.
@Ichiro51: paypal almost always sides with a buyer in a transaction
why?
selling
- Craigslist in person
- Google Checkout
- Amazon Marketplace (more fees)
buying
- ebay
- paypal
- B&M stores
- CL
paypal has more to lose from the buyer going somewhere else to buy stuff(and paypal not getting it's fees), but if you sell stuff, there are way fewer places to sell, and online Paypal is king...
wow, thanks for the heads up. i have a business and a personal account (yes, allowed) and if i sell something on ebay, i end up sending the funds from business to personal, because my checking account is linked to personal. i did send myself money in June but i didn't incur a fee. i see it was listed as a 'gift' so i guess i got lucky when i chose that.
If any of the idiots at Ebay or PayPal can read , heres one to paste up at the water cooler:
I have managed to circumvent your ripoff payment system for 8 months now. I haven't paid PP a singe dime to buy what I want. Fuck you. Willing sellers happily take my money orders and checks (!) and cut you thieves out of the loop. Ha Ha . Fuck you. Further ,you will not be able to devise a system that we buyers and sellers can't defeat.
@frank64: If you mean "Gift Payment"? Then yeah, you loose pretty much all your dispute options since you sent it as a "Gift" out of the goodness of your heart and didn't expect anything in return. They're also cracking down on accounts that have excessive Gift Payments.
If you choose to pay a personal payment with a credit card, then there are fees, as it says when you make the payment. If you pay with your PayPal balance or from a bank account, there are no fees. So you can send money from your personal to business account without paying fees or calling and complaining about it.
@JulesNoctambule: +1. Consumerist loves insider info on awful companies, you could have a serial column on Wednesdays or something. I'd definitely make it a point to read the posts.
@YouDidWhatNow?: Remember this when you see Meg Whitman running for governor of California next election.
@Snarkysnake:
That's all well and good until a seller screws you after you've sent them a money order. It sounds as if you've had no problem with your system so far and hopefully you won't, but if you do, you are simply SOL. (I don't like ebay/paypal any more than the rest of the posters, just pointing out a flaw I see in Snake's system) I guess it's really a no win situation...
@wiggatron: X3 Paypal is pretty much dead to me too since fee-BAY jacked up their rating systems etc as you describe. Plus Paypal's issues with refunding payments to bogus buyers.
@ribex: Just make sure you don't keep alot of money in the accounts as Paypal has been known to take money back from bank accounts linked to their accounts.
@Snarkysnake: Hey, buyers were always able to pay with money orders and checks even under Fee-Bay's new rules. It was that sellers are not allowed to "advertise" that they take money orders and checks.
The issue with buyers is to be discriminating with sending money orders as to not get ripped off. So many of the money order rip offs came from newby buyers sending big money for a bogus auctions that experienced people could see were rip offs. Such as, hmm, 20 feedbacks for $1 vhs tapes and now a brand new Apple computer for $500 this must be my lucky day!
If I was the US Post Office I would be really really mad about this issue as I bet it beat on their money order sales.
How would adding a fee in a sneaky manner be more useful to me? Really, I want to hear this one
both ebay & paypal can rot in hell.
The only 2 caveats of using the "personal" tab on Paypal are:
(1) If the person who you're sending the money to is not in the US, you will have to pay a 0.5% fee (way smaller than the 2.9% plus $0.30 fee).
(2) If the person who you're sending the money to runs away with the money, you have almost zero chance of getting the money back.
@MoreFunThanToast: Have you seen eBay's new scam?
Free listings for 5 items every month.
Too bad they take 8.75% of the selling cost at the end (way more than it was before).
@katstermonster: Simple, they didn't add a fee, they added TO a fee, they increased it. Near as I can tell PayPal's always charged a fee for receiving cash, it's what they do.
So what are the alternatives out there for the average guy to sell their stuff? I've seen some lists out there but when I check out the site I'm not impressed. PayPal is the big dog only because eBay is big.
so if they weren't really "adding" fees, then they must have either been "subtracting" fees or "changing the ratio" of fees?
I mean, it's either you are adding a fee or you aren't. There's very little weasel/wiggle room in the statement.