Paypal and Canadian Merchants
January 14, 2009
Hi,
I’ve been using Paypal to process my credit card orders since 2001 and overall, it’s a pretty good service.
… In fact, I would argue that Paypal is essential for just about any e-commerce site since it is used by so many merchants and most importantly, just ordinary people.
Paypal’s main advantages are:
- Easy to set up.
- Can accept several types of electronic payments: credit card, e-checks and Paypal.
- Since Paypal is so well known, it will put your clients at ease. You’d be surprised at how nervous people still are of buying products online!
The Dark Side of Paypal .. for Canadian Merchants
For reasons unknown to this humble nerd, Paypal has a process in place that is not favorable to merchants/companies based in Canada.
Specifically, if you want to transfer your US cash out of your Paypal account to your US dollar bank account (that happens to be in a Canadian bank,) Paypal will not allow you to do this. Instead, Paypal will only wire transfer to a Canadian dollar account. And in the process, Paypal takes take a hefty premium on your money in the conversion. From my experience, Paypal can harvest as much as 6% in the conversion.
.. A nice little bonus for them.
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OK, this is a bit of a rant … I know. But there is some useful information that I think many would find useful nonetheless.
Thanks,
Stefan Mischook
www.killersites.com
