Luckycharms was stunned by PayPal‘s fee structure when he took a closer look at how much he was paying, and annoyed that he didn’t hear of the company’s changes in terms of service that took place nearly a year ago because he didn’t opt in to receive notification emails.

He writes:

I thought consumerist readers might be interested in this.

For the first time in over a year, I sold a few things on ebay. I’ve always tried to avoid people paying with credit cards, since that ends up costing me $$$. For that reason, I always had the “personal” paypal account, as opposed to the “premium” account where they charge you up the wazoo for everything.

When I received payments at paypal for my ebay sales, I was taken aback by the fees paypal was charging me! In the past, since I made sure payments were from bank accounts, I never incurred fees. When I asked paypal about this, they informed me that they had conveniently changed their entire account and fee structure back in June, 2009. Without telling me. Without telling anyone, as far as I can tell. Well, anyone who didn’t OPT-IN to paypal’s “website changes” emails, anyway! Here it is, direct from the horse’s mouth, after my complaint to the BBB:
…
Please understand we may amend the User Agreement at any time by posting a revised version on our website. The revised version will be effective at the time we post it…. We do offer notification preference where we send you an email directly with the current updates or changes. To turn this feature on it is located under your notification preferences in your Profile subtab once logged into your PayPal account….

If you have any further questions, comments, or concerns, please feel free to contact me directly at executiveoffice@paypal.com.

Sincerely,
Chris
Executive Escalations
PayPal, an eBay Company

That’s right – you have to turn that “feature” ON! And you probably get alot of junk like “hey, we changed our login button to blue!” emails, along with the important ones, when you do sign up.

Suffice to say, paypal refunded me the $10 they had charged for those auctions, but they were adamant that it was a one-time grace. Really, they should be giving it to everyone, as far as I’m concerned.

If you opted into PayPal’s notifications, let us know whether Luckycharms is correct in his theory about it being full of annoying spam.

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